My highlights
While Autodesk's consumer revenue will double this year, Bass said, "We don't make enough [on consumer apps] to pay the rental on this floor."
The real reason? "A huge amount of learning about how people really want to work with their tools," Bass said. Autodesk needed to figure out "how quickly you had to get someone from knowing nothing to satisfaction" in order to eliminate the learning curve and make professional software as satisfying as consumer apps.
Compared to modern consumer apps, he said. "Enterprise software sucks." The message has become, "less expensive means easy to use, more expensive means really difficult to use," Bass said. "We have to remedy that!" Increasingly, professionals want the ease and convenience they get in their personal lives in their business environment as well - and are intolerant when the don't get it. Business software companies that don't give them that "will be losers," Bass warned.
Tip: http://xsisupport.com/Consumer app users want "instant gratification," he said, and "we're trying to push that into our professional products.