I don’t want to come across as negative – Fusion 360 is clearly a tool for professionals and it’s the sort of tool to which I might aspire to drive with skill; but I am a “deep nerd” and a control freak technically inclined so the junior TinkerCAD documentation comes across as lacking focus to deliver what I want to learn/do, whereas Fusion360 seems to work really hard to (a) lock-up my data in the cloud so that I have to 2FA to get at it, and (b) attempt to upsell me to buy a professional account for a tool which I still regularly shout-at when it doesn’t help me do what I want.

I would have to be a masochist – or far less thrifty than I am – to want to buy a subscription to get through the “painful” stages of learning.

I don’t know if anyone at Autodesk will read this, and please don’t see this as a rage-posting because it’s not – I know people at my local makerspace who can drive Fusion360 like I see other people drive Photoshop, and produce wondrous things, quickly – but I am not likely to become one of them. The barrier to entry with Fusion360 is imposing and feels over the past 18 months of dabbling-every-few-months to only be getting higher.

In 1993-ish I saw Sun Microsystems make one of the biggest mistakes of its existence: it threw direct educational sales to “Channel Partners” and effectively axed its own and ubiquitous presence in universities – where students could play-with and learn to love the hardware. Soon the channel-partners realised that they could make more margin by selling cheap Intel boxes to universities – which adopted free software, specifically Linux, to drive them – and the students then took Linux with them into industry.

I believe this was a big cause of Sun’s eventual collapse. I wonder if @Autodesk, by tightening access, account features, and through their focus, are similarly cutting their own throat?

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And lo! – in my Email, this… “10 document limit”, anyone? Explaining what that actually means, requires an entire blogpost. This is not going to assist hobbyist uptake, although doubtless it will move someone’s relevant short-term compensation metrics at Autodesk.