Fusion 360 replaces old Inventor Fusion from Autodesk Labs

Autodesk Fusion 360 is our cloud-based tool that combines industrial and mechanical design, collaboration, and machining into a single, package. Because it is cloud-based, you can access your designs virtually anytime, anywhere from your Mac, PC, or mobile device. If our summer interns are any indication, this is the way millennials want to work:

• Three Summer Interns Collaborate Using Fusion 360 and Autodesk 360

I'll never forget a few years ago when one of our interns asked one of our Senior VPs if Autodesk was ever going to make any software for young people.

Fusion 360 started out on Autodesk Labs when our Design, Lifecycle, and Simulation (DLS) division hosted a technology preview on Autodesk Labs for Inventor Fusion. Users who worked with the technology preview gave us feedback that they loved the combination of direct editing and history-based modeling but also wanted to create designs on non-Windows devices. This is one of the reasons the Inventor Fusion technology preview graduated to Fusion 360.

For quite a while after the end of the technology preview in March 2013, we continued to a allow users to download the Windows installer for Inventor Fusion. Recently we started to get some problem reports like:

• To: Labs IV Fusion <l[email protected]>
  Subject: URGENT Bug
  To whom it may concern: We are running Inventor Fusion in a Windows environment on a Mac computer. We get a crash every single time we go to use Inventor Fusion. We have tried several times to delete it and install it again, but that has not solved the problem. Could you please check into it?

Unfortunately since the focus of DLS is on Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Fusion 360, this has led to the following type of response:

• Subject: Re: URGENT Bug 
  It looks like you are running Inventor Fusion. Unfortunately this product is no longer supported; however you can find a lot of the functionality you were using in Inventor Fusion in Fusion 360. If you are interested you can find out more here: http://fusion360.autodesk.com where you can also download a free trial.

To avoid having users download an old technology that is no longer supported and may not necessarily work, I removed the download from the Autodesk Labs site. It's full steam ahead for Inventor and Fusion 360.

Focused support is alive in the lab.