Tony Peach, the director of DWF corporate strategy for Autodesk, says the campaign stems from customer inquiries about the best way to exchange engineering documents.
"The visual data in engineering documents gets very dense, and PDF doesn't know how to deal with that, partly because it's built on paper. Engineering is not flat -- it's 3D, and engineers need a format that accommodates that."
Building an alternative
Autodesk decided the answer was to build up the DWF format it introduced seven years ago, making the format easier to use in key applications, and building new products around it. A little promotion wouldn't hurt, the company also decided.
"The fact that Adobe is aggressively marketing to this space means we have no choice but to try to educate our customers," Peach said.
Autodesk offers a free downloadable application -- Autodesk Express Viewer -- for viewing and creating basic DWF files. But with the move, it hopes to spur sales of Volo View -- a $49 application with additional annotation and review capabilities -- and future products that would add more collaboration tools.
"This is a new thing for us," Peach said. "We've only sold drawing tools -- that's all we've ever done. Now we're talking about collaborative tools. But we see a pretty clear need here."
Adobe's Meyers said he's somewhat puzzled by Autodesk's decision to promote DWF by bashing PDF, given that engineers and architects will likely want to use both formats, depending on who they're communicating with and what kind of documents they're trying to share.
"It's pretty obvious they feel threatened by this, even though we think they're completely complementary," Meyers said. "We don't think that anything Autodesk is doing with DWF detracts from PDF."
