It’s always good to have friends come visit. This week, many of my friends in the Autodesk Civil team were in town at their Plano office. They’re working on great things for the next year and beyond. In spite of his crazy schedule, Peter Funk was kind enough to play guinea pig for our first recorded interview. Take a listen after the jump.
The interview was recorded on a stock iPod with Griffin’s iTalk accessory, so don’t look for a NPR quality sound level. It runs about 25 minutes, and we talk about how he got to where he is, why backwards compatibility is so hard, where Vista support is headed and some thoughts on C3D adoption.
I hope you’ll take a short break and get to know one of the smartest men I know. I’m truly impressed by Peter’s ability to move across products and find new ways to use tools that we all think we know. Check it out here, and let me know what you think, and who you’d like to get to know better. We’ll be working to get more of these interviews over the next few months. Maybe when we come visit you….
Very good interview. Peter, thank you for letting us all into the meeting. James, has anyone ever told you that you sound like Dick Van Dyke?
Really cool interview. I heard my question asked which was cool. Did not realize there were new builds of AutoCAD every week. And, yeah James does sound like Dick Van Dyke, heh. 🙂
Thanks James – great interview!!! Kind of fun to get an insider’s view on C3D.
Thanks James – good interview. As far as other people to interview…Dave…Dan…maybe someone that works on specifc features. For example, find someone that works on surfaces, someone else that works on alignments, someone else that works on pipes, etc. within Autodesk. Oh it would also be fun to hear from the entire civil3d.com team. We read your stuff, but some of us don’t get to see you in person very often if at all. It would be nice to put voices with the text. I have said this before, but I have a hard enough time reading all the blogs out there, I find myself visiting the discussion group only when I have problems. Maybe every other week or once a month you could get as many of the civil3d.com team on a skype recording and discuss some of the more recent dialogue going on in the discussion groups. Each of you could throw in your favorite discussion and your thoughts on them. You can only cover so much in text before it gets to be too long (kind of like this comment – for those of you that are still reading) and you sometimes need to just explain things verbally.
Thanks to Peter for taking the time and thanks for an interesting 25 minutes.
Just a thought, don’t interview Josh Nelson:-).
Or me for that matter.
Some Ideas.
The lady from Civil3D chronicles that has disappeared.
I know you walk a pretty fine line here but some sort of end user roundtable might be interesting. Could be done with a conference call. Or the next time you’re in my shop you could do it with my shooters.
Mike Barkasi, never mind.
You know I like your idea of me doing a survivor show at AU. I just didn’t have the guts.
I gotta say I was a little disappointed that there was no intro music by Parliament.
I would like to comment on the concept of ‘country packs’ of styles for the US. Peter pointed out the large number of non-standard approaches taken by various cities, but! There’s a much more addressable approach than thinking every city from Dallas TX to Dallas SD needs to be addressed.
I will venture to guess that the largest population of Civil Engineering users in the US exists in the State DOTs. Caltrans alone has 7000 seats of CAD software. Add in the non-DOT firms that work with DOTs, all the ex-DOT employees now running city engineering groups, and you’ve gt a huge population that’s very targetable.
Pick the 6 largest states and release a ‘country pack’ of DOT styles to subscription customers. Then in six months, release the next 6. There’ll be a lot of commonality (and from the marketing side it would help get C3D accepted in DOT work.) Plus it makes it easier to swallow the subscription costs if the packs are subscription only.
[…] the thing. If you go back and listen to my interview with Peter Funk, and do some math, you’ll realize that we’re approaching the end of the 2009 product […]