CGenie - Professional CG Textures

Following our CG upgrades survey, we interviewed Marc Petit, Senior Vice President of the Autodesk Media & Entertainment division, to find out his thoughts on the results and what he's taken from the survey.

The 'personal' touch

CGenie: As you know, we recently conducted a 'pulse check' of user opinion around the topic of upgrades for the software they use. Now as you've quite rightly pointed out in our discussions before this interview, whilst you may operate in the same market, there are many challenges that you face as an industry-leading organization that some of the smaller CG companies can avoid.

Do you think it can ever be possible for an organization with 300,000+ customers to compete with far smaller companies in terms of 'personal' customer service?

Marc: I want to believe that having a large number of customers is not an impediment to delivering high-quality service. There's no doubt that as the number of customers increases, the way a company interacts with them changes and can feel less personal. It's not possible for Autodesk or anyone to communicate with 300,000 people in the same way as they would with 3000 or even 30,000. Products such as 3ds Max or Maya have a very large numbers of customers in many different industries, while products such as Flame, Smoke, Lustre or our middleware products HumanIK and Kynapse address a much smaller number of users for whom we deliver a high level of personal service.

Managing a large customer base is definitely challenging, but we are focused on making our customer service as high-quality as possible. And this requires new, more scalable approaches. We have been investing in our back-end systems to centralize customer data and developed the AREA, our online community. This site was developed to provide a free service to literally hundreds of thousands of our users (the AREA currently has more than 250,000 registered users).

The AREA allows people at Autodesk to communicate directly with our customers through blogs and forums. It also provides product tips and tutorials, job listings and a range of other services. Now that the community is so big - and it's still growing - we've kicked off a project to make it more customizable and personal. Plus, you'll see some great improvements to the site coming later this year.

Innovation

CGenie: For many companies the goal is around competing with standards like 3ds max and building the same breadth of feature set. It's no doubt harder to drive innovation in a product that is very powerful already, but also one that has no 'leader' to follow.

How do you know what features to focus development on for each release and what drives you to continue to innovate?

Marc: It is not so much that it is harder to drive innovation; it is more that the perception of innovation changes as a product grows in scope. When you release version 1 of a product it has very few features - so adding 10 features to v2 is seen as a major step and highly innovative. Once the software matures, even a large number of features will seem marginal. There's actually a proven economic law called diminishing marginal utility that applies here. It's what makes it hard for products like 3ds Max and Maya to appear highly innovative to all users at every release even though they feature many new improvements and capabilities.

How users rated Maya on the statement
"The company focuses on developing the features I need first"

And while that perception is definitely real, and very natural, the reality is that our engineers do strive to innovate, and are as passionate about it as any other R&D team out there. For example, they've delivered recent innovations like Maya Nucleus (unified simulation framework) and 3ds Max Exposure (lighting analysis tool for sustainable design). We just announced the latest version of 3ds Max - 3ds Max 2010 - and it has nearly 350 new features!

We follow a fairly rigorous development process to determine the focus of each release and what features to develop. Each release is based on extensive research. We gather feedback from a lot of different sources including face-to-face customer feedback, our user forums and from special advisory groups. We prioritize the feedback and build prototypes that we then validate with customers. We use the feedback from this process to finalize the release. The Alpha and Beta process is then used to fine tune the product even further. Every release is driven by customer requirements - but because we have a large customer base across many different industries the result is always a balance and not specifically targeted at one type of user.

Customer interaction

CGenie: One of the trends that I think all industries are experiencing is a change in how the corporations interact with their customers. Openness, honesty and the personal touch are replacing the professionalism and cold exterior of the old world. Whether you're Dell telling customers to openly complain about their faults or Obama embracing the social media, there's a real strength in community these days.

Do you feel you have changed at all in how you're interacting with users/customers compared with say three years ago?

How users rated 3ds Max on the statement
"The support for this software is excellent"

Marc: We are definitely evolving our approach to interacting with users. We invest a lot in our user community, the AREA, and we encourage everyone at Autodesk, including our product management and development teams, to participate. We bring a lot of content there; for example, we have started to broadcast demos and MasterClasses live from tradeshows for those who cannot attend these events. We've also increased our direct contact with customers through local events and our extensive product validation process. But, as your survey results showed, we still have a ways to go to see the impact of our actions.

Another change has been our approach to education. We've been investing in building more effective training and education globally: helping emerging markets develop new skills, sharing knowledge through our MasterClasses and helping the next generation of kids prepare for the digital world with specific secondary school programs focused on understanding everything from pollution to anatomy. And by education I am not necessarily referring to product training but also developing the soft skills that will help the next generation of artists succeed.

We plan to continue to build the AREA into a high-quality community site and we view it as a prime vehicle to communicate broadly with all our clients. I encourage you to share your feedback with us there. All the product management and R&D teams make an effort to read the posts and incorporate useful feedback we get from the AREA into our plans.

Catering for everyone

CGenie: One of the challenges you face is the wide capabilities of tools like 3ds Max mean you may be catering for one section of the market perfectly whilst another feels they're getting missed out. Is addressing this part of the reasoning behind the 3ds Max/3ds Max Design split? How far do you see these products diverging to meet their target audience requirements?

3ds Max and 3ds Max Design is a good example of how we've responded to customer feedback to serve them in a more personal way.

Marc: Actually, splitting 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design is a good example of how we've responded to customer feedback to serve them in a more personal way. Today both products share the same feature set, with the exception of Exposure, which is only in 3ds Max Design, and the SDK, which is only in 3ds Max.

Our customers were telling us they wanted an experience tailored to their needs - depending on whether they are working in entertainment or in design - but still, they needed the same tools and the same capabilities. So we refined the out-of-box user experience, documentation, tutorials, UI configuration and presets for each group of users to reflect their different workflows. For example, if you're creating beautiful renderings of buildings for a living, tutorials and training materials about animating characters, are not particularly helpful. We kept a single binary with 100% data and plug-in compatibility - so switching between the two flavors or moving data and plug-ins between them is trouble-free.

3ds Max 2010

CGenie: It's very difficult to compare such a diverse set of products ranging from brand new to very mature, very feature focused to broad feature rich, free to expensive etc. Yet there seems to be a trend where the larger and more popular a product becomes, the less passion there is from the community. I suppose that the 'hype' fades a little and the trade-off with becoming an 'industry standard' is exactly that: you become a standard - something that's 'expected'.

Yet there seems to be a bit of excitement around this little 3ds Max 2010 product you've got on the production line? Is it fair to say this release is a bit more special than the last few? What strategies have you changed with this release compared with previous versions?

Marc: I think your comment about what it means to become standard is correct. Becoming a standard imposes some responsibility in terms of what you can and can't do - from maintaining legacy code to ensuring that the product addresses all users as equally as possible - and that is not always very ‘sexy'.

And you are right, we have had quite a stir around our 3ds Max 2010 announcement. Not so much because we changed strategy but more because people like the focus of this release. In the past couple of releases of 3ds Max, we had set new foundations for scalability and realism and what is exciting about 2010 is that our focus has shifted back to creating a strong 3ds Max product that has something visible for everyone. The result is a very compelling and balanced release.

Because the 2008 and 2009 releases had a little bit of a bias towards visualization, we knew that we'd have to ensure that 3ds Max 2010 packed enough punch to make our entertainment customers sit up and take notice. So we embarked on an ambitious agenda and, because of our investment in design visualization paid off, we were able to significantly increase the size of the development team for the 2010 release. Thanks to a huge collaborative effort involving customers, product designers, a strong R&D team and great feedback from alpha/beta testers, we have been able to deliver nearly 350 great new features in 3ds Max 2010.

Learning from XSI

CGenie: XSI is the newest product in the Autodesk family, whilst there's plenty of corporate strengths that Autodesk will bring to it, it's also observable that the XSI scores were markedly higher in the survey.

Do you feel there are any lessons that Autodesk could learn from the way XSI manages their users? Maybe an injection of small business mentality?

Marc: Absolutely, there are definitely good lessons to be learned from Softimage. The former Director of Marketing at Softimage is now leading the Autodesk M&E marketing team and has kicked off a new Customer Experience initiative. New companies and new teams always bring new insights and skills to the table. The Softimage team has a unique perspective of how to do business, and this is helping us identify areas where we can improve. There are always lessons to be learned - in fact, the initial ideas for the AREA came from bringing the Alias team on board.

The strengths of 3ds Max and Maya

CGenie: 3ds Max and Maya's scores are fairly low compared to the smaller competitors, yet between them they dominate the market. Now part of this can be attributed to them being industry standards being taught in the universities, users having to use them and so on, but obviously that argument can only go so far.

What would you consider the strengths of these packages that people may be forgetting?

Marc: It would take a long evening to discuss all the strengths of both 3ds Max and Maya. Both are rich, complex products with many years of feature development and they've been tried and tested in an almost infinite variety of production scenarios.

...we need to change and evolve the way we do business with our very broad and diverse community - something that we are focusing on.

I think the reason so many depend on them is that - because they are so complete in functionality and can adapt to so many workflows - careers and companies can be based on either product with a high degree of confidence. They are a low-risk, high-value proposition for the vast majority of professionals in a myriad of industries. Being so comprehensive, they do take time to master but since both products have become standards, artists can use that mastery almost anywhere they choose to go - and that makes it a great long-term investment.

Other strengths include, as you mention, the fact that there is a very well established education and training community making it easy to get access to courses and learning materials wherever you are in the world.

We also have a large plug-in developer community providing extensive additional capabilities for specialized needs. 3ds Max and Maya are at the foundation of many production pipelines, there are numerous plug-ins, tools and resources to complement them. Some of them come from us directly like Mudbox, Motionbuilder or Toxik, but most of them come from 3rd party developers using our open APIs, SDKs and file formats (3ds, obj, fbx).

We do however take these low scores very seriously. Part of it is inherent to the natural gap between mature products with large, diverse user bases and new or niche products with focused users. The other part of it is due to the fact that we need to change and evolve the way we do business with our very broad and diverse community - something that we are focusing on.

3dsBobo

CGenie: One slightly startling revelation from the survey was the 'Bobo' factor - a couple named him as the core of Autodesk, several respondents demanded he become CEO - and one comment I'm hoping you'll be able to substantiate is that the 2011 version is to be rebranded 3dsBobo? Is this true?

Marc: Bobo is definitely our secret weapon! I can't tell you what a walking encyclopedia he is of 3ds Max trivia, technical facts and history. He's been a huge contributor to the community. I think the welcoming attitude of the 3ds Max community is something very special and worthy of nurturing. There are many more special people that roam this universe contributing countless time and energy to helping other 3ds Max users. It's one of 3ds Max's greatest assets.

Focusing on the future

CGenie: We're going to run the same survey next year - what would you consider a great change to achieve in those results?

Marc: First of all, I think this is a great idea. We are very competitive and surveys like this one gives us more reasons to step up the work on refining and improving our internal processes, external communications and direct engagement with our users across all communities and geographies. But I'm only mildly optimistic about our ability to significantly change the perception of a large company like Autodesk within our user community. It seems that the expectation grows with the size of the company! We always welcome and act upon the feedback we receive, so I would encourage everyone to let us know how we're doing either through CGenie.com or the AREA. I look forward to see these bars move to the right next year!

CGenie: Marc, thank you very much for speaking to us and for the openness of your responses.

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