FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE... Autodesk?

To take a page from Shaan Hurley’s FREE FREE FREE...Autodesk? posting:

The original plan was to have Autodesk Design Review 2008 be free. People would buy Autodesk Design Review 2007. Autodesk Design Review 2008 would then be free. Nice and clean.

Autodesk Design Review is scheduled to be released in the April time frame; however, the new Autodesk sales year starts February 1. Since we would no longer be selling Autodesk Design Review, we could not put Autodesk Design Review on our pricing list for the year. So we were faced with the “What do we do for customers in February and March issue?” So we decided to make Autodesk Design Review 2007 free for February and March while we completed our work on Autodesk Design Review 2008. This begs the question, "What about the people who paid for Autodesk Design Review 2007 now that Autodesk Design Review 2007 is free?" Autodesk took several steps with these customers in mind:

In November of 2006, we removed Autodesk Design Review from the subscription price list to avoid having customers buy subscriptions only to not need them only 3 months later.
For customers with existing subscriptions, they will receive Autodesk Design Review 2008 CDs when the product is released.
Dealers and resellers were made available of the February 1 changeover early in the process. This allowed them to factor this information into any large deals that they were in progress.
For individual sales or small sized deals, Autodesk Design Review was made available at a promotional price of $49. This reduced fee covered the customer’s use of the product from when it purchased it to when it became free.

Autodesk is interested in maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. If you have any questions about your account, we recommend you speak with your Autodesk reseller or sales representative.

You may ask “Is Autodesk less committed to DWF by no longer charging for Autodesk Design Review?” No. Autodesk is more committed than ever to its DWF initiatives. By offering Autodesk Design Review free-of-charge, the company has stepped up its commitment to moving customers to DWF-based collaboration solutions. Today, every Autodesk design software product has built-in, advanced DWF publishing. Our collaboration and data management solutions support DWF for their design data management. New DWF-based applications are in development, including Project Freewheel available from the Autodesk Labs that offers DWF-file viewing on-demand without installing software. Now more than ever, DWF can go beyond the paper.