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Darrin Hatakeda's avatar

Great to see Works getting some love. I started on PC Works 3.0, and then worked with Heikki and ArthurDH putting OLE into WinWorks. Those were fun times trying to get all of those to interoperate.

Steven, really enjoy hearing your voice reading the post. The intonations add so much more to the story.

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Gary Lang's avatar

A better comparison than Photoshop and Elements at the time would have been AutoCAD (SRP $1800 at that time) and AutoCAD LT ($795 SRP).

The founder, John Walker, had stated a need for "AutoCAD Lite" in 1984, but the same "Are you out of your mind?" dynamics you described made that a non-starter. But when Carol Bartz joined, she brought people from Sun with more pricing architecture experience, and they noted that: 1) 68% of users used applications built on top of AutoCAD or mildly modified AutoCADs (using AutoLISP and ADE - a C-based set of APIs; 2) There was an untapped group of users who were buying lower cost competitors' products using AutoCAD compatibility (ala Open Office) as a draw, and their total sales was estimated to be the same as the TAM of AutoCAD, which was sold by resellers at the time.

So Carol said, "it's time to move". We took out all programmability and released AutoCAD LT in 1993, based on our first good Windows AutoCAD. The company's revenue doubled in 3 years. We also undertook initiatives to double down on more expensive vertical AutoCADs for Architecture and Mechanical design (ACAD for Architects and ACAD Mechanical) with the intent of providing even more targeted functionality at higher prices than base AutoCAD.

It worked. Entirely new channels for sales motion opened on all fronts. _Company_ revenue was up 5x in as many years, going from $180M at the start of this process to $895M.

MSFT go to market channels and customers were more similar to ADSK than ADBE (i.e. B2B), thanks to Carol's leadership on all sales and marketing.

So it might have been a more interesting marker for discussion at that time. It really worked.

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