|
|
Пишет Slashdot (![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} syn_slashdot)@ 2024-02-09 14:40:00 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
John Walker, Co-founder of AutoDesk, Has Died
John Walker, programmer and co-founder of AutoDesk, has passed away. A statement from his family: It is with great sadness that we announce John's death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia. Declining to follow in his family tradition of becoming a medical doctor, John attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to pursue a future in astronomy. However, after he discovered the brave new world of computers, he never looked back. John worked at the university's Project Chi (X) computing center where he studied computer science and earned a degree in electrical engineering. John met Roxie on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, and they married the following year. Roxie and John drove cross-country a few months later for John's new job in California. Eventually he left that first job and worked at various others in the bay area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File and from there John's story is best told by John himself in his prodigious work, which is all methodically organized and available to the public at his website Fourmilab. A 1991 memo from Bill Gates (PDF): A source of inspiration to me is a memo by John Walker of Autodesk called "Autodesk: The Final Days" (copies available from JulieG). It's brilliantly written and incredibly insightful. John hasn't been part of Autodesk management for three years and hasn't attended any management meetings for over two years, so he writes as an outsider questioning whether Autodesk is doing the right things. By talking about how a large company slows down, fails to invest enough and loses sight of what is important, and by using Microsoft as an example of how to do some things correctly he manages to touch on a lot of what's right and wrong with Microsoft today. Amazingly his nightmare scenario to get people to consider what's really important is Microsoft deciding to enter the CAD market -- something we have no present thoughts of doing because it would stretch us too thin. Our nightmare -- IBM "attacking" us in systems software, Novell "defeating" us in networking and more agile, lower cost structure, customeroriented applications, competitors getting their Windows to act together is not a scenario, but a reality. [...] In the Autodesk memo, Walker talks about the short term thinking that high profitability can generate. He cites specific examples such as a very conservative approach to giving out free software or a desire to maintain fixed percentages for the wrong reasons. Microsoft priced DOS even lower than we do today to help it get established. I wonder if we would be as aggressive today. This is not a simplistic advocacy for just lowering our prices -- our prices in the US are about where they should be. However the price of success is that people fail to allow the kind of investments that will lead to incredible profits in the future.
John Walker, programmer and co-founder of AutoDesk, has passed away. A statement from his family: It is with great sadness that we announce John's death on Friday, February 2, 2024. He was born in Maryland, USA to William and Bertha Walker, who preceded him in death. John is survived by his wife Roxie Walker and a brother, Bill Walker of West Virginia. Declining to follow in his family tradition of becoming a medical doctor, John attended Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) to pursue a future in astronomy. However, after he discovered the brave new world of computers, he never looked back. John worked at the university's Project Chi (X) computing center where he studied computer science and earned a degree in electrical engineering. John met Roxie on Thanksgiving Day in 1972, and they married the following year. Roxie and John drove cross-country a few months later for John's new job in California. Eventually he left that first job and worked at various others in the bay area. In late 1976, John designed his own circuit board based on the then-new Texas Instruments TMS9900 microprocessor. This venture became Marinchip Systems, and eventually led to Autodesk. The beginnings of Autodesk are well documented by John himself in The Autodesk File and from there John's story is best told by John himself in his prodigious work, which is all methodically organized and available to the public at his website Fourmilab. A 1991 memo from Bill Gates (PDF): A source of inspiration to me is a memo by John Walker of Autodesk called "Autodesk: The Final Days" (copies available from JulieG). It's brilliantly written and incredibly insightful. John hasn't been part of Autodesk management for three years and hasn't attended any management meetings for over two years, so he writes as an outsider questioning whether Autodesk is doing the right things. By talking about how a large company slows down, fails to invest enough and loses sight of what is important, and by using Microsoft as an example of how to do some things correctly he manages to touch on a lot of what's right and wrong with Microsoft today. Amazingly his nightmare scenario to get people to consider what's really important is Microsoft deciding to enter the CAD market -- something we have no present thoughts of doing because it would stretch us too thin. Our nightmare -- IBM "attacking" us in systems software, Novell "defeating" us in networking and more agile, lower cost structure, customeroriented applications, competitors getting their Windows to act together is not a scenario, but a reality. [...] In the Autodesk memo, Walker talks about the short term thinking that high profitability can generate. He cites specific examples such as a very conservative approach to giving out free software or a desire to maintain fixed percentages for the wrong reasons. Microsoft priced DOS even lower than we do today to help it get established. I wonder if we would be as aggressive today. This is not a simplistic advocacy for just lowering our prices -- our prices in the US are about where they should be. However the price of success is that people fail to allow the kind of investments that will lead to incredible profits in the future.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
