Altium REJECTS takeover bid from Autodesk

[EEVblog]

Altium just rejected a takeover bid from Autodesk.
It was in talks with them, but considered the unsolicited offer that was 30% above the market price was undervalued. Their shared just jumped 33% as a result.

[nigelwright7557]

Given you can get perfectly usable software for free I am surprised anyone buys it.

[Monkeh]

Altium just rejected a takeover bid from Autodesk.
It was in talks with them, but considered the unsolicited offer that was 30% above the market price was undervalued. Their shared just jumped 33% as a result.

Probably one of the smartest decisions they've ever made.

Given you can get perfectly usable software for free I am surprised anyone buys it.

Oh give over.

Anyway, I thought KiCad was useless?

[KE5FX]

WTF.  Hosing EAGLE wasn't enough for those clowns?!

[WattsThat]

Every time I see one of these (attempted) mega-mergers, I’m reminded of a corporate entity name from an old Mel Brooks movie:

Engulf and Devour

[ataradov]

Imagine autodesk acquires and kills another industry leading product.  I bet industry would not be too happy.

At the same time, I see a lot of schematics come from Japan prepared in something that is clearly not Altium. Does anybody knows what do they typically use. It looks like a very common piece of software, since all schematics look the same.

[T3sl4co1l]

Imagine autodesk acquires and kills another industry leading product.  I bet industry would not be too happy.

At the same time, I see a lot of schematics come from Japan prepared in something that is clearly not Altium. Does anybody knows what do they typically use. It looks like a very common piece of software, since all schematics look the same.

Guessing it's the same thing that apparently makes it easy to draw polygons everywhere.  Think I had asked before but either didn't get a conclusive answer, or since forgot it...

Tim

[EEVblog]

Probably one of the smartest decisions they've ever made.

If the market tanks they might come to regret it from a finanical point of view.
Note they didn't reject the buyout on principle, it's just that they weren't offering enough. Stay tuned...

[EEVblog]

Every time I see one of these (attempted) mega-mergers

It's wasn't a merger attempt

[RiZsho]

Imagine autodesk acquires and kills another industry leading product.  I bet industry would not be too happy.

At the same time, I see a lot of schematics come from Japan prepared in something that is clearly not Altium. Does anybody knows what do they typically use. It looks like a very common piece of software, since all schematics look the same.

Maybe Zuken? It's a Japanese company.

[delfinom]

The sad thing is Autodesk is "niche" to the world so they won't get the anti-trust beating they deserve

[EEVblog]

Imagine autodesk acquires and kills another industry leading product.  I bet industry would not be too happy.

At the same time, I see a lot of schematics come from Japan prepared in something that is clearly not Altium. Does anybody knows what do they typically use. It looks like a very common piece of software, since all schematics look the same.

Maybe Zuken? It's a Japanese company.

Likely, Zuken is very big.
Bigger than Altium, and was #2 at one point, but that was a decade ago.
They always featured in Altium anual reports as a main competitor they were trying to chase.

[Bud]

This may explain Altium's aggressive tactic to onboard as many subscription renewals as possible. I lost count of the "Last and Final " offers they sent over the last year.

[delfinom]

This may explain Altium's aggressive tactic to onboard as many subscription renewals as possible. I lost count of the "Last and Final " offers they sent over the last year.

Nah, that's just altium's army of commission based sales people needing to make money and just following whatever used car salesman technique they know

[EEVblog]

This may explain Altium's aggressive tactic to onboard as many subscription renewals as possible. I lost count of the "Last and Final " offers they sent over the last year.

Nah, that's just altium's army of commission based sales people needing to make money and just following whatever used car salesman technique they know

Yep, this 

[ajawamnet]

One of the best things that ever happened to KiCAD was Adesk buying Eagle. There's so much talk on the Altium Forum about how a lot of seasoned users are thinking about having their companies take the Altium subscription money and donate it to KiCAD.  Altium recently mentioned how their code has bloated out.  They'd never have the financial mass to re-write it from scratch and get rid of stuff like FORTRAN 77 - yep it actually has that and a bunch of other silly running under the hood.   If I were Altium I'd do the same thing - sell it while it's worth something. Looks like our fearless forum leader was wise in getting the hell out of there.   F'ing sad what it turned into at the expense of corporate greed. Really sad...

[ajawamnet]

Post I did on the Altium Forum

And again I will mention that Autodesk's subscription based model (Ie SaaS or rental) was also a response to their previous perpetual license software model when it was almost dealt a significant blow in the initial Vernor vs. Autodesk.  These CAD tools blew their wad in the late 1990's giving most users all the tools they needed to replace drafting boards and tape up.   And as I've posted before -    shows that SW 1995 is is just as capable for most designs as is the latest versions.   

This happened in the DAW industry which started in the late 1980s - well, if you follow my links -
http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/a_definite_non_turd_Roger_Nichols.html
it started  earlier than that with Roger Nichols (six-time Grammy winning engineer that did Steely Dan and others ) and the Wendel in the mid-70's,

By the early 2000's these music recording tools gave you close to everything you needed to replace a large, expensive recording studio and the limitations of editing multitrack tape with razor blades.  Just like word processors replaced typewriters.

The key is easy editing as compared to the manual methods from decades ago.

Eventually, suites like  Reaper - which was done for the right reasons  -  became on par with software such as Protools (Profools). Listen to Justin from Reaper  talk about it: https://youtu.be/vfaQrOeb_F0?t=202    and at 3:50:

"... when I left [AOL after they bought Winamp], I came away from it wanting to avoid that in the future; wanting to just make things for the sake of making them .. and not have to constantly justify everything with business decisions/motivations. The ability to just make software for the purpose of making it... for the end goal of making something that's really powerful and enjoyable to use"

So, in that realm - just like it is in CAD and other software tools - the DAW doesn't matter;  it's the people's whose hands it's in - that's what makes hit recordings. 

Stephen King wrote Carrie on his wife's portable typewriter.

Just like these DAW tools, people like Justin that are in a financial position to do some really great coding for the right reasons will supplant lower - to mid level commercially driven products.  Look at things like Open Office and such. 

It comes down to "What do you really need to do what you want?"

As to Altium's value - yea, I'd grab the billions from Adesk and run. Altium is in what I would evaluate as a conundrum since it isn't big enough to compete with large, IC design tool companies that also offer products in the same space, and on the other side competing with the ever-escalating Freeware capabilities.   Companies are willing to spend ungodly amounts on IC design tools since the fabrication costs of first articles is stoopid expensive. So these companies have the financial mass to do things like re-write and maintain

Autodesk buying Altium is like humans that hook up with some other, at-the-time desirable human, only to discard them in the end when they tire of them  and go looking for another.  They fail to get the fact that there's more to a fulfilling life than cursory experiences ( I say this being an ugly old fool so take it for what it's worth).

After four decades of doing this it's my opinion that software in the hands of talentless people will be limited to just that.. software. Just like most digital hardware is just a collection of gates and such without software, software without knowledge and care is just as useless if not dangerous.

[ajawamnet]

And one of the long time users posted this:

xxxxxxx wrote:
.., since you use their IP to make your IP all yourz IP is ourz...lol. I don't know what marketing genius at Autodesk thought that would go over well.

my response is:
This will eventually be legally tested,   I'm sure of it

[Mark19960]

Autodesk. Meh.

Some people will stick with Altium or "AutoDesk Altium" as I am sure they would rename it if they get their claws on it. 
IMHO, Altium is better off as they are rather than letting the goons at Autodesk have a go.

[floobydust]

Siemens bought Mentor Graphics for $4.5 billion in 2017 "to expand its industrial software portfolio" and they are close with TSMC with their tools.

It's usual MBA mentality to scoop up CAD companies as one big blog, leaving us with disjointed, neglected, redundant tools.
The usual mess nobody knows how to manage or look after. All in the name of what? Megalomania?

Autodesk would have EagleCAD and Altium, OK now what? Kill off one of them, merge them into a dog's breakfast mega CAD program, just keep selling the two but with a massive price hike and forced cloud use, or just waste everyone's time rebranding and logo changing it. It's so stupid looking at it from 20,000 feet.

[ajb]

Heh, as a long time AutoCAD user for a couple years I was hoping AutoDesk would come out with an Altium competitor.  AutoCAD still has one of the best ways of taking a sophisticated set of tools and making them incredibly fast and reliable to use IMO, and I would have loved to see a real EDA tool built around a similar UI philosophy.  Those hopes were dashed when they bought Eagle, and I don't blame them for trying to buy Altium.  It would probably fit nicely into their lineup to have the Fusion 360 w/Eagle tier and then the Inventor/Altium Designer tier. 

Post I did on the Altium Forum

And again I will mention that Autodesk's subscription based model (Ie SaaS or rental) was also a response to their previous perpetual license software model when it was almost dealt a significant blow in the initial Vernor vs. Autodesk.  These CAD tools blew their wad in the late 1990's giving most users all the tools they needed to replace drafting boards and tape up.   And as I've posted before -  <link snipped to remove inline>  shows that SW 1995 is is just as capable for most designs as is the latest versions.   

"What you can make" is really only one aspect of the value proposition of any piece of design software.  The other crucial part of it is "How fast/easy is it to make something", which depends on a lot of factors including how sophisticated the user-accessible tools are, how easy it is to understand those tools, how fast and consistent the user interface is, how fast the underlying computation is, and how reliable the whole lot is.  In that light, the video you posted shows that SolidWorks has come quite a long way between 1995 and 2012, which is the point it seems like the narrator was trying to make. 

Same thing with AutoCAD, which, sure, is still a 2D drafting tool and still uses some of the same commands and interface language that it did 25 years ago or whatever, but there have been a ton of improvements since then in the sophistication of the tools, the speed of the user interface, and overall capabilities.  In either case, is that enough to make everyone want to pay for annual updates? No, hence the subscription model push, but there is at least forward progress being made with both SW and AutoCAD. 

In the case of Altium, there is also progress being made, and in many ways the software is definitely better in later versions than in older versions.  But compared to a lot of other professional software, Altium still has a LOT of room for fundamental improvements and their trajectory seems to be less consistently positive in terms of software quality.  There's still a bunch of inconsistency and redundancy in the user interface, outright bugs that have been there forever, regressions are common (how tf did they make interactive routing WORSE?! It's a PCB design tool so that's kind of important?!), and the improvements we see tend to not be in the areas that most need it. 

So it seems to me that what makes Altium's subscription model unattractive isn't that the software is currently good enough, but that the updates aren't making it tangibly better to a degree that justifies the price.  I would be much less unhappy to pay $2k/yr if it consistently got me better software.  Instead I'm being asked to pay $2k/yr to hope that maybe they'll actually fix a couple of bugs that I care about or add a legitimately useful feature and that nothing serious will break.  Now they're offering their 365 cloud thing into the bargain, which I'm sure is legitimately attractive to a lot of people, and I guess expecting that to drive subscription sales, which is fine and might even be successful for them (they seem to think it will be, since they think they were undervalued at +40%), but it does make one even less hopeful about how concerned they are with improving the fundamentals of the design software. 

[nigelwright7557]

Oh give over.

Anyway, I thought KiCad was useless?

Kicad is wonderful, it gave me the push to forget PCBCAD software and move on to something more profitable that cant be given away.
Thank you Kicad.....

[olkipukki]

Altium just rejected a takeover bid from Autodesk.
It was in talks with them, but considered the unsolicited offer that was 30% above the market price was undervalued. Their shared just jumped 33% as a result.

... and the price back to late 2020 level 


Autodesk make sense to acquire Altium, they already have low cost all inclusive Fusion 360 package, but missed Inventor-style product.
What else they can do and when last time they build anything from scratch? The cash is cheap these days, time - very expensive. I bet they will buy Altium sooner or later

[olkipukki]

Autodesk would have EagleCAD and Altium, OK now what?

Can you still buy Eagle? I doubt, this is part of Fusion 360.

I guess Altium would be same as Inventor-price category or part of 'budget' collection

[EEVblog]

One of the best things that ever happened to KiCAD was Adesk buying Eagle.

Yep!

Altium recently mentioned how their code has bloated out.  They'd never have the financial mass to re-write it from scratch and get rid of stuff like FORTRAN 77 - yep it actually has that and a bunch of other silly running under the hood. 

Where did you hear that?
Protel for DOS was written from scratch by Nick Martin in Borland Pascal, and then moved to Delphi once they moved to Windows. It never used Fortran.