Top draw: it has its detractors but with the world's biggest user base of designers, the future looks bright and busy for Autodesk Inventor

Engineer, The, November, 2003 by Charles Clarke

BOTH Autodesk and Inventor have been criticised in recent months. Some say the software is lagging behind the main players in the Inventor market space. Some criticise Autodesk for offering it at rock bottom prices to existing AutoCAD users. Others knock the move from an open geometry kernel (ACIS) to a proprietary one (ShapeManager), citing Autodesk's lack of kernel development expertise. And there are many examples on competitive websites of things Inventor can't do.

So, as Inventor goes into Release 8.0, we review the strategy for the product.

The company pays little more than lip service to the modern notion of PLM, choosing instead to attack the market from a design-centric platform. And rightly so, as Autodesk has one of the best production drafting...