Reading an article like this is similar to reading 2 articles on the same subject... one by a Republican and another by a Democrat. Both groups will be passionate, provide supporting statistics, and depending on which one you believe you'll either leave supporting a cause or just more confused. All the while, those that live within the decisions made by these two groups have their own perspective on reality.
The facts are correct, but how you determine the value statement in there is the bigger question. Also, while the facts stated are correct, the back stories and facts not told about Autodesk, their marketing, Greg's background, private feelings inside the reseller channel, etc leave huge holes in the equation.
There is a huge amount of facts that I won't go into in an open forum, but I will state that Revit LT.. whenever it finally emerges... will be a light weight product that will benefit the consumers that only require its stripped down features. In this article Revit LT is used as thin veil to cover a tirade over Autodesk market, advertising and business practices. Many in the reseller world, just like everyone else, have had a difficult time in the economics of our (AEC) industries. Certain individuals have lost their businesses, their jobs, and watched better prepared competition beat them to the punch all while profit margins have shrank. Few resellers are making heavy profits, those that are profitable are doing it from other services and offerings beyond standard software sales. Even Autodesk itself is restructuring to have more offerings based around internalized software management (SaaS) and service offerings. It's less about seats of software (selling the seats directly) and more about distributing those seats to generate a continuing revenue stream from those seats very existence in subscription revenues and various services offerings.
In short: resellers are now having to make a living like you do (directly or indirectly, we all do) by selling their services or other products instead of just software revenues. Autodesk is making money by putting as many seats of software in your hands as possible then generating continuing revenue from it. Their Autodesk 360 project is, it would seem, being used to get you to use them as a Service provider of software and cloud computing applications/CPU cycles.
Back on topic, Revit LT is a long asked for product that will be accepted widely and griped about for being too stripped down. Greg's article had almost nothing to do with it.
