Solidworks in the cloud.

Pls. read this

Mechanical Conceptual is on the cloud.

If they pay attention to the Fusion boards and down time......they better not.  Relying on their own servers to run millions of seats, um, not a good plan.  People letting their IP float around, there'd be another uproar.

PS - Fusion is hardly a replacement.  Look at the limitations.  If you do sheet metal or multiple sheet drawings (just 2 examples off the top of my head), you aren't going to be able to move.  It's always been "in development"

I can't answer as to what their plans are but I did receive a survey from them a couple of months ago that was directed at using the cloud.

     I myself am not in favor strictly because we live in flyover country and cloud access can be spotty. We seldom go a month without losing net connection for at least a few hours once or twice.

I'm not a fan of the cloud in some ways.  Not having your application local can cause problems if there are internet issues.  Having millions of dollars worth of data floating around out there is also a scary thought.

I am in favor of SWX having a basic program.  That is a basic, basic program.  No sheetmetal, no weldments, no decaffeinated FEA, etc.  Limited part features, limited assembly parts, etc.

$995.

$250 maintenance.

think of job shops mostly using SWX to open and do minor manipulation of customer part files and think of hobbyists learning CAD or playing with 3D printing.  They don't need 1/10th of what Core can do.

Call it the gateway drug.  They will sell a lot less core seats, but they will probably open up larger markets and be able to better compete with the cloud products coming down the pike.  Many of these new users will eventually want more capability, like sheetmetal.

This will also cut down on the bootlegging.

The first time I heard about cloud based SW was in 2011, My teacher claimed all cad will be cloud based soon.

It is 2017 and I am barley seeing this trial. I would not completely rule this out but I do think it has some time before it is a reality that functions properly.

It would be nice if they fixed all the bugs in current installed versions before moving on to new and better packages, but thats just wishful thinking.

I'm not s huge fan of the cloud, we have seen in the past what can happen when your data is on the cloud via the leaks from Apple's cloud storage.  Most companies that have propriety documents, especially product models and drawings won't be easily swayed too have them out in the cloud.  Also, can you imagine the performance on a large assembly while issuing commands over the internet?

Interestingly I remember having this same type of discussion about Pro-E and SW about 15 years ago. Pro-E was the bug robust program that could do what ever you needed to do and I loved using it but you $paid$ for it. SW on the other hand could handle the more basic stuff well and had the ability to work around some of the other things but was substantially cheaper so everyone could afford it. I used about 30% of Pro-E's capabilities but had the horsepower to reach for the stars when I needed to. When I switched to SW there were lots of times I would say "I used to be able to do this but..." Now days which platform has more users?

The cloud may be the coming thing and the price point will play a big part of it when it does. Maybe a better option would be to sell the stripped down version that doesn't require the cloud. I am still opposed to the cloud for practical reasons, potential lack of internet access being a big one, but it probably will have it's place.

Actually, SolidWorks announced their intention to do exactly this.  When was that?  2009 or 2010?  Something like that.  Big, problematic backlash from the users at the time.  Epic.  For good reason, too.

First problem is that this was handled poorly by the bigwigs and marketing people, since it came across as though cloud storage of files might be the only available option.  Military and other guarded IP design was immediately unable to use SW under those circumstances.  Poor Internet areas were another problem with this model.  Going of subscription and having no (or ambiguous) means of retaining files was another.

Since then, sure, lots of things have changed.  But not for everyone.  I trust the cloud as long as everything done on the cloud is OK to give away publicly.  But for the inventive IP stuff I'm always working on?  No dice.

As an aside, I've done a lot of computer fixing for a lot of people.  I'm astounded with what I've seen in terms of worms, malware, rootkits, etc. and the creative (destructive) way these things can alter/funnel internet traffic, log keys, alter/delete files, etc.  Ain't no way I'd trust the cloud for sensitive IP files among the masses.  No way.

Others have said most of what I have to say, and I have one thing to add.

Since networked files corrupt with a mere blip of connectivity issues, I can only imagine that it'd be far worse with cloud files.

I'm old enough to remember 'vaporware', which apparently they renamed.  Just put a fast SSD drive in my computer and the SW performance improvement was huge.  Am I going to get that on the cloud?  If you only model parts I can see how that works.  I model entire waste treatment plants, thousands of parts and assemblies.

There are two kinds of computer users, those that have not lost their data and still have jobs, and those wishing they had not lost their data.  I am more paranoid about it than most, hence I have lots of backups in lots of different ways.

At my last job I heard we were getting a new server.  I had backed up every job I had ever done at the company to a portable hard drive and to CDs for each job taken off site.  They planned on using the backup tapes to load the new server.  The backup tapes were toast, all of them!  I was the only guy in the company that would actually still have a job if the server hard drive had crashed!  The new system they installed was interesting. USB backup hard drives for each day of the week.  There was one little problem.  They wrote over the daily drives every week.  I frequently went out of town to job sites for a couple weeks at a time.  So if I didn't notice something missing it would be over written before I got back!

In SWW2014 there was a demo of NVIDEA system running SW and being accesses by a 8in tablet. It looked to be be running (tailored) smooth. I don't know what the size of the model was. I looked into it a little. It was powered by a virtual computer with the Graphics being handled by a top of the line GPUs and gobs of memory. The cost of two seats was ~20K each (full seat) with the hardware. A little pricey. However, If you needed a limited feature set, or needed workers to be highly mobile, this would be a good solution. There is also network speed concerns. I'm not really convinced, yet.