My fellow team member Brian Souder a longtime veteran here at Autodesk along with AUGI wrote an article on the new Customer Involvement Program "CIP" in AutoCAD 2008.
The new CIP feature in AutoCAD 2008 provides the option to send AutoCAD usage and hardware details to Autodesk "opt-in". Why would you do that, well all the data is anonymous so we have no idea who you are just your usage and hardware details so we can make more informed design decisions. For example some of the important details might be which common commands are used in a sequence or where they are used from such as the menu versus the commandline or a script. Better products require better customer feedback and data. It may also be used to prevent changing something that people actually use or to expand support for certain hardware. There have not been any performance issues with this enabled and we got some really great data during the AutoCAD 2008 beta testing. This is not some secret spyware as it is really an optional way to improve and better our products with more solid data from our customers and their use of our products.
Read the article for more details: Help Autodesk to Help You - March 2007
