How did Autodesk became a CAD company? The short answer is: COMDEX 1982. Up until that point we were really focused on the product Autodesk [an office automation system for small computers which only later became the name of the company] that was going to be the killer product. AutoCAD was kind-of this… it was interesting because we were pretty sure we could get it to market quickly. It and AutoScreen (a screen-based text editor), we were pretty sure we could get those done for COMDEX. It was a real push
Driving back – and this is how we got there, in a big station-wagon we rented in San Francisco – there were three of us that made the drive… we’d said we’ll do five products and count on one being a hit. We now knew which one was the hit – there just wasn’t any question. We maybe sold four or five copies of AutoScreen after that. When we got back, the phone was ringing off the hook with prospective dealers saying “how do I sign up to be a dealer?” or manufacturers saying “OK, how do we get you the machine? When can we have this ready?”. From that point on there really wasn’t any question that AutoCAD was going to be the product.
> Well, AutoCAD, to my knowledge, did something in the software industry that has never, ever happened with any other product. It sold more than a million copies at more than $1,000 a copy. And that never happened. You’ve got expensive software but a tiny market, cheap-large market. That’s what it really took to hit that revenue figure, and I think that Gates probably having seen the prices of his own products erode, over time, as the market became larger, assumed that by the time we got to the millionth unit, we’d be down in the $200-500 price range. And that not only didn’t happen, but the price went up, over time. And that created that unique profile. And that profile, I think, cost Autodesk a great deal in the ’80s and ’90s, because it created an impossible standard. Whenever Autodesk was looking at doing something new, it had to be another AutoCAD. Another Microsoft Word wasn’t good enough, another DBase II wasn’t good enough. And there aren’t any – nobody’s ever found another AutoCAD.
Source: An interview with John Walker – Part 1 – Through the Interface