One of the major attractions of the Cloud for vendors is that it ties in customers, providing a reasonably consistent revenue stream. It is an effective anti-competitive strategy. There are various technical and other methods that can be used to ensure that it’s difficult or even impossible for customers to jump ship. While that’s all [...]
 31 October 2011, 12:44 pm |  4 comments | Tags: CAD Management, Tie-in | Category: Autodesk, Cloud, Interoperability, Subscription, Thoughts, Web Stuff A few days ago, John McCarthy died at the age of 84. He didn’t make a fortune selling gadgets, he just profoundly affected the world of computing. He will be remembered mainly as the father of LISP, without which it is quite possible that AutoCAD and Autodesk would not have survived beyond the 80s. [...] 27 October 2011, 9:37 am |  One comment | Tags: John McCarthy, Vale | Category: Announcement, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Development, LISP, Nostalgia, Thoughts, Web Stuff, Win In May 2010 I took part in a phone conference with several Autodesk people about the Cloud. Part of that discussion was in the form of an interview, which I will publish in later posts. Another part was in the form of a verbal presentation from Autodesk’s Tal Weiss, concentrating on what was then [...] 27 October 2011, 8:47 am | Leave a comment | Tags: Cloud, Collaboration, Interview, Tal Weiss | Category: AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Web Stuff OK, this one’s a biggie. For many, security is the biggest Cloud turn-off. Drawings are valuable property, and the thought of putting them up on the Internet is enough to give some people nervous twitches. I see two major worries: Is my property safe from destruction? Is it safe from unauthorised access (copying, modification, [...] I guess most of this blog’s readers also read WorldCAD Access and upFront.eZine, so it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that in the latest upFront.eZine, Ralph had procalimed “The Cloud is Dead” and referred to some of my recent posts here as supporting evidence. I’d just like to point out that it’s Ralph announcing [...] 26 October 2011, 1:57 pm | 2 comments | Tags: Cloud, Prophecy | Category: Cloud, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Thoughts, Web Stuff One argument that CAD in the Cloud supporters sometimes make is that the Cloud is taking over regardless of what anybody thinks, so we might as well just embrace it and reap the benefits. Nice try, Nostradamus, but I’ve been around computers long enough to see many Next Big Things come to nothing and [...] A frequently stated advantage of CAD on the Cloud is the access to large amounts of processing power. Instead of relying on your lowly local processor to perform complex tasks, you can instead zap the job up to the Cloud where vast numbers of processors churn away in massively parallel fashion and then zap the [...] 21 October 2011, 6:24 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: Cloud, Performance, Ribbon | Category: AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Cloud, Subscription, Web Stuff One concern with any SaaS (Software as a Service) product is the potential for downtime. Is this really an issue? After all, big Cloud vendors have multiple server farms as part of their huge infrastructure investment. This provides redundancy to keep things going even in the event of a major local disaster or two. [...] The “other” C word – collaboration – was super-trendy in a mildly amusing way a couple of years ago, so I hesitate to use it here. But it seems to me that it represents a real potential benefit of CAD on the Cloud. Not just potential, because it’s already here, free for anyone, thanks [...] 18 October 2011, 9:51 am | 4 comments | Tags: Collaboration | Category: AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Web Stuff I just used Autodesk Cloud Documents for the first time, and was asked to confirm my acceptance of the Terms of Service. Fair enough. But just what is in those terms, and what do they mean to you if you are dubious about using the Cloud? Will you be reassured by what you find [...] 14 October 2011, 9:57 pm | 21 comments | Tags: Cloud, Terms and Conditions | Category: Autodesk, Cloud, Legal, Other Autodesk Products Using AutoCAD 2012 for Mac? Don’t use special characters such as # in your folder names, because AutoCAD will, under certain circumstances, delete whole folders worth of files when you open a drawing. See here and here for more detailed information. 13 October 2011, 3:05 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: AutoCAD for Mac | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Bug, Tip Early last year, I ran a poll to gauge your feelings about CAD in the Cloud. Here are the results of that poll: As you can see, the poll response bell curve was clearly biased toward the frightened end of the spectrum, and there was little in the way of excitement at the [...] One of the more interesting things about running a blog that is visited by a reasonable number of people is the fan mail. My immense modesty prevents me from keeping visible the thousands of positive comments that are posted here, but I thought I would give you an idea of the sort of praise [...] 10 October 2011, 12:18 pm | 12 comments | Tags: Cluelessness, Spam | Category: Comments, Fun, Grammar, Web Stuff Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three. A few [...] |
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Any AutoCAD WS users out there?
In the post Cloud benefits – collaboration, I asked for people’s real-life experiences using, or attempting to use AutoCAD WS. In particular, I’d like to hear about you using its features to collaborate with others, which is a major selling point of the Cloud. As the other post hasn’t seen any replies yet, I’ve [...]