Autodesk DevDays 2009 – Part 2

I am at the ITC Windsor Manor hotel in Bangalore attending the Autodesk DevDays 2009 event. One of the first slides that Jim Quanci, the person who runs Autodesk’s Partner program put up read:

Today’s discussion is covered under your ADN Agreement with Autodesk. The information we will be providing is highly confidential and is to be shared within your company on a “need to know basis” and to NO ONE outside your company

So I cannot tell you whatever I heard or was shown at the event. But technically, I can tell you what I said at the event since Autodesk’s NDA does not cover the things I said. So these are the questions that I asked.

When will AutoCAD run natively on the Mac?
Surprisingly, I got a definite answer to this question.

Will AutoCAD run as a Software as a Service in the future?
I got a satisfactory answer to this question.

Why cannot AutoCAD open Revit and Inventor files?
I was not satisfied with the reply to this question.

When will Fusion be integrated into Inventor?
I got an expected answer to this question.

It is important to note that audience was filled with programmers only. The replies to my questions and those of other developers were purely technical and free from any marketing bullshit.

I guess there is one thing that I can say though. Autodesk has outlined some great plans for AutoCAD. Their focus is moving from AutoCAD being a drafting and documentation software to a modeling and analysis solution.