This week in upFront.eZine: Spatial gets you onto the cloud

From this week's issue of upFront.eZine:

1. Spatial Gets You Onto the Cloud
    - RADF R3 and CGM
    - Q&A

2. Nightmare Scenario for Cloud-based CAD Users
    Guest editorial by Dave Ault

Plus tidbits of other news from the world of computer-aided design in "And in Other News." You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2010/upf-652.htm

Comments

[Greg Furst]

Ralph, thank you for an even-handed look at what Spatial has released. While other bloggers on net have chosen to make this much bigger than it really is, you have wisely, and soon-to-be presciently, hewed to a very realistic line about what all of this means to the CAD world.

Here is what I think: what Spatial has announced with RADF is really not a big deal, notwithstanding the grandstanding by Spatial folks, abetted by immature reporting. I cannot imagine Dessault would let let slip a chance to crow if this really was a significant event. The SCHEME language and ACIS have been around for ever. If these were truly remarkable technologies, they would be holding sway in the CAD world today. Fact is they aren’t.

And moving it to the cloud, heaven and the moon wont change that fact. If their implementation is what ‘cloud’ technology is all about, then you are going to see every CAx company out there “innovating” the crap out of the crap they sell today. Lets be clear: making any application run on remote servers is really not innovation, its just application of currently available technology to desktop-bound software.

Lets call Spatial for what it really is: a peddler of technology from parent Dessault, and some of it is good. I believe Spatial would be out of business if it weren’t for the V5 components they sell. ACIS alone cannot sustain this business. While “armies of Russian developers” stokes one imagination, the truth is CAx developers don’t quite employ armies any more, and even if they do, this new crop of Spatial’s ho-hum, been-around-the-block technologies will not dent the size of those armies.

But the hyperbole seems never to stop.