I'm guessing someone at the company he worked for deciding a reason for upgrading and whether or not it was a good reason I doubt it was completely forced, more probably the person who decided they needed to upgrade was found with a really good salesman or there was a legitimate reason for an upgrade.

Either way I can't see the difference between upgrading engineering software and say upgrading an entire point of sales system for some new features or because of a good salesman.

This kind of thing just seems to happen in business no matter the type, but a large portion of Autodesk software is sold through resellers and this is probably where the marketing issue comes into play.