Here’s a great testimonial for Cloud
CAD in the Cloud, for whatever reason or reasons, turns out to be a very polarizing topic. We’ve seen it here on this blog numerous times. People who advocate for the cloud 9 times out of 10 are selling something. No where have I heard of this being more poignantly demonstrated than by the almighty Mike Payne (founder PTC, SolidWorks, Spaceclaim, etc.) at this year’s COFES, according to Deelip. Read this article. Mike Payne reportedly stood up to defend a cloud presentation against a skeptic in the audience, and the internet connection at the hotel proceeded to fail.
Mr. Payne, by the way, is now the CEO of Kenesto, a company with one of those products that you can never figure out exactly what it does. They do, however, have a web demo – a video of Kenesto in action. You’d think a guy like Payne would know what he was doing by now, and you’d think that a web-based company would know how to present itself on the web. Follow this link and watch the video. It sounds like it was recorded on a 1970’s cassette recorder, and is so full of dead air (well, dead that is if you don’t consider the sound of the motor on the cassette recorder as sound) that you quickly forget why you’re sitting there in an (almost) silent room.
A startup can do better than that. Hell, I can do better than that. How is a company that can’t execute using today’s technology going to usher in tomorrow’s technology?
Payne seems to be spiralling out of relevance. He went from PTC to SolidWorks, to (???), to Spatial, to Spaceclaim, and now to Kenesto. Decreasing relevance for the past decade anyway. Of course this is all post-retirement. I think people are going to discover at some point that the “inevitability” of the cloud has its limits. CAD is a special case among business software. Part of the cloud mantra is that the cloud will save your infrastructure resources. But ironically, it is going to require that we double or triple our infrastructure’s resources in order to use it for something like CAD. Cloud for storing bootleg music and movies? Hooray. Cloud for writing blogs? Hooray. Cloud for sharing pictures of your friends blowing cookies in the backyard? Hooray. Cloud for storing your company’s most sensitive data, and live editing giant files? Don’t buy it.
‘Zactly. Electricity, too:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/22/obamas-war-on-coal-hits-your-electric-bill/
@Jeff Mowry
I’m sure my DSL & cell phone bills will go down too, and gasoline will soon be much cheaper.
Here’s an article from Computer Graphics World detailing Adobe’s quest to conquer the cloud:
http://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2012/Volume-35-Issue-3-April-May-2012/Business-Evolution.aspx
It’s subscription-based, and will cost more than the “boxed” version, but you get access to more minor Adobe tidbits (whether you need that or not), so they hope the value of the overall package is maintained.
I’m sure CAD-in-the-cloud won’t cost more.
There is nothing to worry about concerning attacks originating from outside the US. The states are already financially crippled from the inside by compulsive gambling bankers, shortsighted self serving corporations and ineffectual corrupt government. The real financial terrorists like Corzine walk free doing fundraising for the re-election of friendly politicians while the so called homeland security organisations busy and justify themselves harassing and humiliating ordinary folks in bus stations and airports and monitor their private communications and whereabouts like a totalitarian state. Subjugation of your citizens is a bigger threat to your country’s wellbeing and so far you seem very vulnerable or indifferent to people hacking away at that. Once upon a time the US was the largest promoter of liberty and rights to others…
And then we have rogue elements like Oliver North II in Leon Panetta creating and sponsoring perpetual conflict, destabilisation, regime change and misery around the world militarily overtly, covertly and by remote control for the benefit of defence contractors and to retain strategic resources for the industrial Empire that was. Meanwhile the FED exports inflation/devaluation/funny money and endeavors to pull everyone down into the same currency and derivative fraud whirlpool in the hopes the US will somehow bob up first again out of the distributed chaos.
Just a different take on things from the outside… 😉
It is well OT though so Matt can remove it without explanation if he wants 🙂
It’s not the cloud that concerns me its what terrorist countries can do with it. The states are too familiar with terrorism to simply ignore the fact that cloud based apps pose a major threat to our countries infrastructure. I recently heard Iran will rank right up there with Russia and China for hacking. So why is the country that is most vulnerable to hackers the largest promoter of cloud based services? I wonder how many millions of dollars are lost by bringing down a cloud service. Who needs a nuke when you can financially cripple a country?
@Jeff Mowry
I just tried to have a simple phone call on my cell phone to my partner yesterday. The whole conversation was punctuated with verbal handshakes, “Did you say….”; “I didn’t quite catch that….”. Given that cloud based stuff may gravitate to handheld/tablet devices depending on cell phone connectivity that is just another point of failure.
Dave Ault,
Thanks for asking hard questions. I think that Solidworks geometry is so thoroughly buggy that they will give up trying to fix it. We may have to suffer with new cloudy buggy geometry until we jump ship.
Evan,
This lack of information about what is really going on and why is one of the two biggest problems cloud companies have with credibility. The other of course being a proven set of products that operate reliably across the typical web conditions we have to deal with. Lots of things are promised and said but nothing is clarified. Suspicion and cynicism and rejection by potential users is a result. Lets face it, there have been a ton of questions asked about cloud costs, security and reliablility by many people and NONE of the serious questions have been answered. My take is that if it was just a problem in the PC only a very foolish cloud promoting company would not have issued a statement to that effect. But as usual the record of failure for whatever reason and the fine traditions of sillence or obfuscation continue and so will the poor reception by potential users.
My personal opinion is that ignoring the plethora of questions asked on a regular basis is deliberate policy and purposefull deceit. Start here for a suggested list of unanswered or poorly answered questions. http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2011/01/41questionsaboutthecloud.html
@Evan Yares
Evan, the point about the audio quality was that these people are not rank amateurs. Why represent yourself this poorly if you can do better? A string of decisions lead to a crappy video as their primary content communication on their website. What other bad decisions might they make. I figured out what they did by watching a crappy video. I couldn’t figure it out in the first 30 seconds of reading vaguely optimistic marketing statements.
Whatever the weakest link was in the Tech Soft case, it was below the threshold for what it takes to get the job done. Maybe it was just below the threshold in this particular circumstance, maybe the issue is more widespread. The thing is that Mike Payne was defending something that is not as realistic as he wanted people to believe. And he has a vested interest in the Cloud being ubiquitous and reliable.
It’s one thing to rely on the cloud for videos of your friends getting drunk and riding bicycles down City Hall stairs. It’s another thing to rely on it for your company’s most sensitive data.
Weakest link:
I wasn’t at the Techsoft demo. However… I’d be interested to know if, before they were doing a demo in front of a room full of people, they had checked for packet loss, latency and signal strength? Is it possible that the weakest link, in this case, was the Techsoft computer?
Actually, might be interesting to hear from the Techsoft guys about what problems they had. As it is, a bunch of bloggers who were not at COFES are taking Deelip’s word for it that there was some big problem with the hotel WiFi.
Regards Payne and Kenesto: He’s retired 4 times, so far.
I have a hard time extrapolating weakness in Kenesto based on poor sound quality on a demo video.
I spent a little time reading the material on Kenesto’s site, and I was able to figure out what it does, and why it’s significant. I was also able to figure out that it’s an excellent example of a product that should be SaaS and cloud based.
And, for what it’s worth, I too believe that the inevitability of the cloud has its limits — especially with CAD software.
Matthew West reminded everyone (in the comments area of Deelip’s article) that the venue determined/controlled the internet quality, hence the failures noted by Deelip. Of course. I believe that’s the whole point. Loss of control of internet connectivity isn’t infrequent at all, even in cases where that venue is the home office.
From Deelip on the subject, “I am a firm believer in the cloud. But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And in the case of cloud computing internet connectivity is the weakest link. COFES 2012 proved this beyond all doubt.”
Well, yeah. Hence my firm non-belief in the cloud—for now. Most of my experiences along these lines aren’t reliable enough for conducting business in any serious way. I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on it for my livelihood.
I take it that was done on the cloud.
I used to work at a place that had written their own software to do that. I ran on UNIX and started out as a Radio Shack CPM program on a TRS80. When I was there the software was so sophisticated that it tied the whole company together in what I called “Management by Software”. The president of the company wrote it and controlled the software. There was almost zero paper in the company including the shop floor. If a salesman sold 5 product, an automated picker would move the product from the rack to assembly. Assembly would build it and pass it to shipping who would know everything they needed to ship it. The shop would know to build any components in short supply because of the order. Purchasing would know to buy more raw materials. Only two levels of management in the whole outfit.
And no cloud. In fact the interface was a terminal emulator.