Of CAD, clouds, and iPads

People who are trying to make money off of “the next big thing” usually aren’t waiting around for “the next big thing” to happen. They are usually trying to make it happen. And people, especially people hungry for money, are prone to an excess of enthusiasm and a lack of real information from time to time. Don’t go to the grocery store when you’re hungry, and don’t go to a strip club if you’re lonely, don’t take the MENSA test if you’re insecure about your intellectual capabilities. Don’t try to develop a new product if you’re desperate for money.

So how do those little nuggets of wisdom affect you and me, CAD users? At this point in time, they affect us through the cloud. Here’s why, from my point of view.

First analog mobile phone call in 1973 (reenactment 2007)

Life imitates art – Get Smart shoe phone in 1965

The story starts with a cell phone the size of a shoe box. Not women’s shoes, mind you, big manly shoes. Cool thing, but expensive, and not quite portable as a personal device. Primarily owned by traveling businessmen, and carried and powered in the car. Then it progresses to the PDA – maybe a Palm device. Just a portable electronic scheduler and contact keeper. Convenient, expensive, but not connected. Evolve to the Blackberry, aka “Crackberry”. Still primarily in the business applications. This time it is connected to email. Users get addicted to the constant connection. Graduate to a smartphone where all of the business applications of the advanced PDAs are combined with the ubiquity of consumer cell phone.

And a step further to the iPad which uses smartphone software/hardware technology to bridge the gap between portable smart devices that are primarily phones and portable web-connected devices that are primarily computers. With the iPad, we now have portability and data usage in a single device that is not primarily a phone, and it is big enough to actually make data usable.

What’s the difference between an iPad and a traditional computer? To me, its the operating system and how the software is installed. A “real” computer can live without a DVD drive or a rotating hard drive. External USB drives and flash memory can serve those purposes. But on Apple, Windows, Linux, Unix, OS2, DOS, you can install software from sources unaffiliated with the OS writer. With phone-based software, you have to buy each “app” for each new device directly from the company store. I recognize that this is more of a captive business tactic than a technical limitation. But then that’s where this whole thing is headed.

Maybe the difference between a phone and a computer is the use of the word “application” which sounds very technical, and the word “app” which appeals more to the 140 character attention-limited crowd. You can get apps for the phone OSs to do most of the little tasks that traditional computer operating systems do, like screen capture, audio capture, text editing, etc.

Another question that comes to mind here is when do the business-minded tools such as the Blackberry evolve into the entertainment-minded toys such as the iPad? The transition is subtle, yet I think important. SolidWorks itself seems to struggle with the same question. They used to benchmark against other CAD applications, now they benchmark against games. Computers in general have devolved from exclusively high-dollar tools to ubiquitous toys for pre-adolescents.

Do you see how all of this relates to the cloud? All of these mobile devices require data to consume. They don’t have as much internal storage as a “real” computer, so the data has to be delivered from somewhere else. If you are someone hungry to make money, you can make sure the devices require external data, because you can control external data. Anyone who fights copyright battles with folks who do not recognize “rights of ownership” for any kind of data is the big winner in this scenario. Movie companies can control access to their data again. In fact, anyone at all with data on the web (cloud) gains from these mobile devices that can access anything anywhere, especially as the form factor (screen size) gets large enough to actually be meaningful.

The one thing this does not address is content creation. Most mobile users are content consumers, they don’t really create anything. Well, they create images, short movie snippets and text. These are raw materials for real content, not real content in themselves. People who create real content are CAD designers. Writers who use text and images to create a finished piece of writing. There are several other kinds of real content, but these are the kinds that matter to me since those are the kinds of content I create.

First of all, mobile devices are not appropriate form factor for real content creation. I could envision using an iPad to do writing incorporating images, but I don’t think I could envision real CAD work on an iPad. The trend recently is for CAD monitors to get absolutely huge – 30″ or more – not small. CAD laptops are uncomfortably large – 17″ monsters that barely qualify as “portable”. Who even does CAD on a small laptop? I’ve got a 12″ tablet, and I’ve only ever used it for CAD presentations, not real CAD work. So CAD on mobile is going to be limited to viewing, possibly markup. Not real CAD design or data creation.

So, if you don’t use mobile for CAD, is there any place at all for cloud data storage? Well, some people already have this in a web-based PDM program where they control the web server and access the web through a web portal. Even PDMWorks (SolidWorks Workgroup PDM) has been able to do this for years. So data accessible through the web is no real breakthrough.

The remaining piece to the puzzle is if you would place your application on the cloud. With the answer to the mobile device CAD being for the most part NO, I see very little use for cloud-based CAD. I mean yeah, there will be some folks or some organizations that embrace this because it fits some niche need that they have, but this is not a mainstream capable idea in my estimation. Mobile devices that access networks are a runaway success in the mainstream, but does that mean that they are applicable to CAD in some real way? The internet bubble pop of 2000 was all about basing business plans on unrealistic applications of popular technology. CAD content creation is something that requires hardware that at this point is not portable – large displays. Until tiny and cost effective projectors become ubiquitous, I don’t think this hurdle is one that will be overcome. And even then, you have to ask “just because you CAN, does that mean you SHOULD?”

I think the CAD companies, or one of them anyway, is desperate for profits, and is pushing this cloud concept beyond its natural limits. Cloud for mobile data consumption? Yes, absolutely. Cloud for content creation or data authoring? No. Not yet. There were reasons why CAD users turned away from centralized data storage and time-share applications served by a combined hardware/software vendor when it became possible in the 1980s. Unix workstations became available and obsoleted minicomputers and mainframes. More local control. Why would you let someone else control your hardware, your software AND your data? Why would you hand over 90% of your business operation to an outside party with basically no accountability? I can’t even think of a reason, unless it was as an emergency measure. I don’t want to hear comparisons to Salsafarce.com any more. That is not real data authoring or content creation. I want to hear, if you have it, compelling reasons to use CAD on the Cloud. Now. Put up or shut up. Why are so many subscription dollars being spent on this sort of stuff?

Why are users being threatened with this kind of mentality from Jeff Ray, CEO of SW:

Q: Will the cloud version of SolidWorks be the only version in the future?
Jeff Ray: When the pain of the status quo becomes greater than changing, then they will.

source: Ralph Grabowski’s UpFronteZine

And to emphasize this point, and validate what I’ve been saying here, Bernard Charles, CEO of Dassault Systemes said:

The cloud is an inflection point, as are new form factors like iPod and iPad.

source: Ralph Grabowski’s UpFronteZine

The problem is that I don’t believe that the new form factors or the cloud itself are suitable to the needs of SolidWorks or Dassault Systemes main thrust of business – CAD data authoring. The inflection point does not apply across all possible computer users. There is not necessarily an intersection between mobile computing and CAD data authoring.