How Autodesk disrupted itself with an iPhone and iPad app

“When Chris Cheung and Thomas Heermann, two middle managers at the software company Autodesk, first showed off their new iPhone drawing app, they got some skeptical looks,” Brian Bergstein reports for Technology Review. “Why would anyone want to doodle on that tiny screen? And what could a $2.99 app matter to a company with around $2 billion in annual revenue?”

“Two years later, Autodesk’s SketchBook apps for phones and the iPad are best-sellers that have been downloaded seven million times. It doesn’t add up to a huge amount of revenue: perhaps $15 million,” Bergstein reports. “But there’s more than money to this innovation story.”

Bergstein reports, “With its first consumer hit, Autodesk now has more customers than it did in all its previous 29 years combined.”

Read more in the full article here.

4 Comments

  1. Wait a minute…… Didn’t Meg whats her face, the current HP CEO do some time at AutoDesk where she refused to develop for the Macintosh OS?

    Now Apple devices have given AutoDesk their biggest customer base in the company’s history.

    Hey HP, take a hint and tell Meg to take a walk

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