Autodesk VP in our product development group, Brian Mathews, was on our team when he invented the DWF format. Our first foray into sharing design data via the internet was a WHIP! plug-in for the Netscape Navigator browser. Internet Explorer had not really emerged on the scene yet. Sun Microsystems had just released Java, so we wanted to call our files whip files (.whp) so you could whip design data all around the web. AutoCAD VP, John Lynch, worried that people would not associate the solution with Autodesk, so we called them Drawing Web Format (DWF) files (.dwf) instead. When applications other than AutoCAD were able to create these files, the name evolved to Design Web Format (DWF). So I have been a DWF proponent from the very onset. My first blog was Beyond the Paper that was based on what could be done with DWF files instead of just printing them.
Customers first noticed that there was no release of Autodesk Design Review for 2014. They feared that Autodesk was…