Autodesk Under Federal Trade Commission Investigation

Computergram International, April 22, 1998

CAD software developer Autodesk Inc is the latest company to come under investigation from the Federal Trade Commission, in a move that's thought to be related to anti-trust concerns, although no specific allegations have been made. Autodesk dominates the PC- based desktop CAD market with its AutoCAD product, but has only around 10% of the total CAD market, sized at around $7bn.

The move could be tied to Autodesk's 1996 acquisition of its competitor Softdesk Inc (CI No 3,062), which at the time was set to launch an AutoCAD competitor, IntelliCADD. In order to get its acquisition through, AutoCAD agreed with the FTC that it would sell off that technology. It went to a spin-off, Boomerang Technology Inc, which was subsequently acquired by Seattle, Washington-based Visio Corp (CI No 3,111). Visio began demonstrating early versions of the AutoCAD compatible IntelliCADD in February, which sells for around a tenth of the price of AutoCAD, and formed the OpenDWG consortium with the idea of widening access to the widely used AutoCAD file format for computer-aided design files (CI No 3,356). The consortium is attempting to stop Autodesk from modifying the format in the next version of Autodesk, which could threaten the business of Visio and others building levels of AutoCad compatibility into their product lines.