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you didn't need venture capital when you had people - who, at that point, were pretty senior
people in their regular jobs - moonlighting and able to throw something like that together."
Release 2.1 of
AutoCAD
(1986) incorporated a powerful built-in Lisp interpreter,
AutoLISP
, designed to empower third party developers to extend AutoCAD's functionality,
thus helping AutoDesk make its product especially appealing to a wide range of vertical
markets ranging from landscape designers to ship builders. Effective with Release 14
(1997), AutoDesk configured the product exclusively for Microsoft Windows (abandoning
the SUN UNIX workstation, Macintosh and other platforms).
Walker: "It was only after Carol Bartz [who became CEO of AutoDesk in 1992] arrived
that the winnowing of platforms started. I think we may even still have had the Macintosh
version then. Maybe, maybe not. But we definitely had Sun, HP Apollo, and SGI, still. Mi-
croVAX had basically petered out, as DEC had abandoned the MicroVAX. Somebody was
working on a NeXT - I don't think that ever got done. But the radical focusing on Win-
dows and Windows NT was really something of the Bartz era. And let me say - that was
something I was 100% vehemently for ... I was onboard with that."
To this day,
AutoCAD
remains the most widely accepted and used program for 2D and
3D modeling. At the same time, several of AutoDesk's native file formats are the most
widely used for CAD data interoperability.
After its purchase of Softdesk in 1997, AutoDesk started to develop specialty versions
of
AutoCAD
customized for architects, civil engineers, etc. Concurrently, the company
began to develop and offer a number of powerful non-
AutoCAD
-based products, including
Revit
, a parametric building modeling application (acquired in 2002, from Massachusetts-
based Revit Technologies for $133 million), and
Inventor
, an internally developed para-
metric mechanical design CAD application.
AutoDesk went public in 1985 with a 1.6 million share IPO priced at $11.00 per share.
In March 2008 AutoDesk was named number 25 on
Fast Company's
list of "The World's
50 Most Innovative Companies." In October 2010, AutoDesk returned to the Apple market
with
AutoCAD for Mac
. As of this writing, the firm has annual revenue of $1.952 billion
and 6,800 employees.
Adobe Systems represented another major software success story.
Founded in Silicon Valley by Xerox PARC vets John Warnock and Charles Geschke in
1982, Adobe took its name from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind
the house of one of the founders.
Adobe's first order of business was to develop and market the
PostScript
page descrip-
tion language, subsequently licensed to Apple in 1985 for use in that firm's LaserWriter
printers. In turn, as the Mac and LaserWriter became integral to the art and practice of
desktop publishing (DTP), so too did
PostScript
. Licensing royalties poured in, funding vi-
tal R&D on which Adobe's future fortunes would be based.
