Recently I wrote the story of how Autodesk “played favorites” in ending its non-disclosure agreements (NDA) concerning the release of AutoCAD 2006 and related products. Today, in doing some long-overdue office cleaning, I came across a print-out of an email from 1993 that described a meeting where an NDA kept people from talking freely—but the situation was “delicious absurdity” according to attendee Jerry Bragstad, who wrote me the note.
Brackets in the text below provide additional context added to the text of Jerry’s note.
Randall,
Do you realize the delicious absurdity of the [Generic] CADD Users meeting [at Autodesk's international user group meetings, 1993]?
There was the King of the Americas [Godfrey Sullivan, at that time an Autodesk VP for Sales, in charge of the Americas region] who said he really wanted to tell us what was going to happen [with the future of Generic CADD, which in reality was the roll-out of AutoCAD LT and the discontinuation of Generic CADD], but couldn’t because it was Company policy not to discuss projects before they were released.
And then, there were ten of us in the audience. Two had no idea of what was going on; six were under non-disclosure. [CAD journalist Ralph] Grabowski and I, who were not under non-disclosure, knew what you all couldn’t talk about.
Isn’t that something out of some Beckett play?
JB