“The company’s first consumer product was an experiment. A team in Toronto developed a dramatically simplified modeling program, formatted it for use on mobile devices, and put it online as a free app, called Sketchbook. Within 50 days, Sketchbook had a million downloads. So the company created more products, and then a whole consumer group focused on design, personal manufacture, and home decoration. In three years, Autodesk had more than 100 million registered users across its various consumer products. Compare that with the company’s 12 million professional users, which it took more than three decades to accrue.
The range of applications people found for the new products was tremendous. Louise Leakey, the famed Kenyan paleontologist, recently used 123D Catch, a web-based app that stitches snapshots into a 3-D image, to model her skull collection so others could view it online. With 123D Make, a product that allows people to modify 3-D models, fans then carved the CAD skulls into pieces that could be printed and reassembled as a puzzle. In Florida, the owners of a female duckling named Buttercup used Autodesk software to get the animal back on its feet after an amputation to correct a birth defect. They made a model of Buttercup’s good foot and printed it. After the surgery, they attached the prosthetic, so she could waddle and paddle like any of her companions.”
photo of CEO Carl Bass in his home workshop where he uses his digital tools for carpentry
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