This is a new low, truly more dystopian than I imagined software could ever get.
Imagine this becoming a pattern. You have software you need for work, and the company behind it wants more money — so they pick the most popular feature and make it pay-per-use. It’s horrifying.
I hope this fails fast and hard, as a lesson to other companies. I doubt it, though. I ran IT at a big architecture firm 25 years ago, and everyone hated Autodesk then. That hasn’t changed — most architects still hate Autodesk, even if they have to or choose to get value from Autodesk products.
At that point AutoCAD still used dongles for licensing. If you upgraded a license you had to have both dongles plugged in. Some computers with multiple upgrades had multiple dongles hanging off the back, and I had to build custom dongle supports so they wouldn’t fall out and deauth a machine in the middle of someone’s work.
So yeah, even with that history, this surprises and horrifies me.
Imagine this becoming a pattern. You have software you need for work, and the company behind it wants more money — so they pick the most popular feature and make it pay-per-use. It’s horrifying.
I hope this fails fast and hard, as a lesson to other companies. I doubt it, though. I ran IT at a big architecture firm 25 years ago, and everyone hated Autodesk then. That hasn’t changed — most architects still hate Autodesk, even if they have to or choose to get value from Autodesk products.
At that point AutoCAD still used dongles for licensing. If you upgraded a license you had to have both dongles plugged in. Some computers with multiple upgrades had multiple dongles hanging off the back, and I had to build custom dongle supports so they wouldn’t fall out and deauth a machine in the middle of someone’s work.
So yeah, even with that history, this surprises and horrifies me.