Wouldn't the onus of interoperability with other CAD programs be on the *other* software? There's enough work getting their products to talk to each other, let alone some third-party.
Certainly Carl (and Carol before him) believe that. Fundamentally though, it's a belief that serves neither society, their customers, our industries, or the autodesk products. In the short term, customer lock-in always _seems_ like a good idea (Just ask the CEO of DEC!) but in the long term, it's rent seeking that benefits no-one except those who take the profits and skedaddle.
From the perspective of an Autodesk customer, who uses several of their products every day, I see no valid reason (except rent-seeking behavior) for Autodesk not joining into the Open Design Alliance and documenting their proprietary version of the DWG format and making it a (dominant) part of the OpenDWG format. There are, after all, many more vendors with software creating OpenDWG files than the single company creating .dwgs.
when Autodesk competes on their abilities, they do a darn good job and come up with very decent tools. Faux competition by FUD and unnecessary customer lockin is apparently ingrained into their corporate DNA though, and detrimental to both us and them. I'm all in favor of competition - it's a great way to get new ideas and find the 'best' approach to solving problems. And if Adesk was actually competing, instead of being an 800lb orangutan, perhaps instead of a choice of light and dark themes, and non-productive eye-candy, they could spend that effort on actully getting interoperability between their own offerings. Maybe Map would even be able to query in C3D parcels! Or finish SSM, maybe even fix MLines
