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The app has garnered 5.5 million downloads, with 1.5 million customers paying for the app. "Even when we had the green light to get it to market, it wasn't on the radar of everyone in the company," Cheung said. But most of the executives, including CEO Bass, didn't find out until a week before it was scheduled to hit the App Store.
#AUTODESK SKETCHBOOK MOBILE PICS PRO#
Jay Shuster, the art director at Pixar, used SketchBook Pro to help design some of the characters for "Cars 2," according to AutoDesk.Īs it got closer to launch, word began to trickle up to senior management.
"Our apps are on a different scale than the high-end tools," Cheung said. When Cheung's team knew it wanted to take the app public, he had to run it by the legal, marketing, operations, and business departments to make sure the company could even do it.
#AUTODESK SKETCHBOOK MOBILE PICS SOFTWARE#
SketchBook represented a foreign business model to the company, which was more used to selling highly expensive software to professionals, most notably the architectural drafting program AutoCAD. Some saw it as an experiment or marketing tool, but not necessarily a moneymaker. So, Cheung said, the mobile SketchBook project team got its share of "weird looks" from people in other departments. Though apps are insanely popular now, back in 2008 there was no way to predict how successful they would be. "A lot of this was driven because we really loved the SketchBook product." "There was a lot of passion for the project," Cheung said. The development team had an eye toward an eventual place in Apple's tablet, but Cheung said at the time he didn't know if it would run on the mobile-centric iOS software or the Mac's OS X, so he took a gamble on focusing on iOS.įor a large part of the following year, he and a trio of developers tinkered around with a mobile version-largely on their own time, as they attempted to bring SketchBook to a new platform. After taking over SketchBook as project manager in 2008, Cheung saw the potential in expanding the program to the mobile world after Steve Jobs announced Apple would be opening its iOS software to developers.
#AUTODESK SKETCHBOOK MOBILE PICS PC#
Prior to its life as a mobile application, SketchBook was a much loved, but little used program for the niche market of tablet PC users who drew with a stylus. Just as important, the success of SketchBook injected a little buzz into a stodgy company mostly known for catering to a specific audience of professional designers, architects, and artists.
The payoffs were huge: SketchBook served as a springboard for Autodesk to get into the business of providing design tools for the average Joe, a direction the company hadn't previously considered. SketchBook's success was partly born of the extreme hands-off approach of Autodesk's management team, a fact that holds lessons for other large corporations looking to get into the app world. "We definitely didn't have the attention of the company," said Christopher Cheung, project manager in charge of SketchBook.
So it's surprising that Chief Executive Carl Bass didn't know about the application-which lets you make an array of sketches with your finger-until a week before the launch. When Autodesk's SketchBook Mobile application launched two years ago, it garnered more than 1 million downloads within the first two months, propelling the company into a completely new business. SketchBook project manager Chris Cheung, who spearheaded the move to build a mobile application version of the program.
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