CLOUD ARCHICAD?

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Why would anyone want this?

It's a horrible model that gives the software developer way too much power and influence over any particular firm's ability to work how they prefer and choose to work and the workflow that works best for them - not to mention the risk of exposure and/or potential abuse and violation of their intellectual property and data.

Not to also mention that it depends on how great the internet and broadband service in a particular locale is and would assume that all regions have relatively equal accessibility and cost rates. Which is far from the reality that we live in.

And every Autodesk software user I know where they are using or switching to 'cloud-based only' models all seem to hate it.

I put it right up there with 'subscription-only' licensing model among things I hope Graphisoft is never tempted to switch to or adopt.......especially if its just to keep up with the Joneses or if its in the hunt for the almighty Dollar (or Euro, or Sterling Pound....or whichever currency applies).

Maybe their BIMx Labs project will be instructive and informative as to how great (or not) such a cloud-based model and service works and more importantly how eager users are to adopt it.

[Eduardo Rolon]

Agree with Bryc, for a test try using SketchUP Web and you will hit every single problem with a program that is not even close to what AC does.
(I think this is a spam account though)

[Barry Kelly]

ejrolon wrote:
(I think this is a spam account though)

Yes it is - duplicate of this post.

https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=66487&p=295763&hilit=Cloud+ArchiCAD+in+dev...

Original poster has been banned.


Barry.

[furtonb]

I agree with the posts above, I hope this never gets implemented as a mandatory move.

Same applies to subscriptions, the difference in fees one needs to pay with the subscription-only model is staggering, over 15 years you could almost save a small apartment even when talking about two seats. Yeah, AC is cool, but investing in real estate sounds much more fun, eh?

Jokes aside, I've seen this article the other day:
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-drops-fresh-details-about-upcoming-windows-10-pc-as-a-servi...

Even the thought of "PC as a service" makes me somewhat sick: the SaaS (what about we call this Something as a Service from now on - maybe I misunderstood, it's not a service for you, as a user, but a service for the shareholders to make some money) model is the manifestation of pure greed in most cases (hello, dear letter A companies that we all used or need to use occasionally and other lovely corporations!), but outsourcing all your means of production to a third party proposes risks and introduces a level of dependency that is insane, it just creates such an asymmetric relationship that I wouldn't want to be in.

Virtualisation is important, there is no doubt in that, but I like and prefer the peace of mind that owning stuff means. Let it be the software or the workstation it's running on... The flexibility of scaling a business is also very important, providing options is extremely agreeable, no doubt in that. I think the current licensing model of AC is good - you can buy it for your core employees, but you have the option to rent further licenses for occasional use, completely reasonable. Problems arise in my opinion when your software which is not really a "service" rather a "tool" become service - adding a few GBs of proprietary cloud or linked services (in the form of a small UI) doesn't really justify moving the whole thing as a service.

I think I'm quite oldschool in this sense - renting-only software might be good for companies that also "rent" their people and run the company with Excel sheets only, that have high level of fluctuation, where downsizing is the norm when the projects run dry, but I prefer a world where I can just unplug the computer from the web and still keep working 100% - this world is sadly fading with each passing day. What happens if there is a disruption on the server side? Would the company be liable for missed deadlines? Would my clients be happy, that confidential information is not stored in containable hardware (aka. my machine) but "somewhere"? So many interesting, but unnecessary questions.

Maybe I'm just insecure because I've never experienced job security, all my professional experience is about fixed-time or project based contracts, where you are as disposable as the chair that you are sitting on right now, but please make me upgrade because the product is so awesome, not because I won't be open my intellectual property anymore - either because I don't own the software, or the hardware it's running on.

[Erwin Edel]

It would be interesting to be able to host a variation of this yourself, where you could remotely connect to your archicad sessions from location with a bit better performance than most RDP options.

Maybe this is more about your own network options though. Having your own VPN set up and running network key might just work for that?

[furtonb]

I was working in an office previously where they had a really powerful central PC, and the "worsktations" were weak network-oriented small PCs (I think Dell? something as large as a Mac Mini). They used Citrix (https://www.citrix.com) to work "remotely" - they had basically a good 4K monitor at the desk and the mentioned PC. Everything else was handled by the central PC, the CEO said it was well worth buying one extremely powerful than dozens of decent workstations.

When the PC had issues (it occured sometimes), the whole office went down, except the ones using laptops. They were using the Autodesk suite, performance wasn't great. It was years ago, maybe the resolution was too big for the Quadro card serving all the people at that time, but it was average experience to do office work or lighter 2D CAD work.

So the option for advanced RDP is there, but that wasn't "cloud" as in the original post. Putting everything in the browser would be a step back in my opinion, but if someone has a kink for that, I'm not against - just leave my option to stay away from it.

[Marton Kiss]

We've had have several conversations around this topic both internally and with clients. For me the biggest challenge is user-experience. How we - end users of an application - experience the interaction with the software. For some SaaS software this is not an issue - like file management and such, but for those applications, where you interact with high frequency (professional applications, games) you really need a very low latency and high precision to avoid frustration. No wonder, that Google's Stadia and similar platforms are expanding slowly.
We have several clients who experimented with desktop or applications virtualisation but went back to bare metal, as their architects, designers and engineers craved the good old experience.

So my current recommendation is to analyse how much time your team spends in Archicad daily - if it is more than a few hours daily, then tradition hardware might be still your best friend.

Marton

[Bricklyne Clarence]

I thought that Google's Stadia project is no more.
Didn't they recently cancel the project? (or move "resources" to other development areas)?

It was always a big ask.
In gaming your survival is dependent on the library of games available to your users.
And with most developers likely not willing to port their games to an online Cloud service platform like Stadia, they were always facing an uphill battle.

I know of people who tested it and said they had good experiences with it (although they had good broadband service so that might have had something to do with their positive appraisal).

What's funny about that is that these days, with computer gaming, online play is a big part of the user experience for most games with being able to compete against other users through (developer or platform provided and maintained) server systems.
But most of the heavy lifting for the games and gaming (even with those online arenas) is still done locally at the users' end with the console or PC they're using.
You still pay a premium for access to the Online service and the servers providing the platform, so that might be why the likes of Sony or Microsoft aren't in a hurry to develop cloud-only based playing experiences.

It's a different set of questions and concerns for people in work-related use of these systems and potentially services.

Intellectual property integrity and propriety being just one example. As someone else rightly pointed out, what happens if I lose connection in the middle of sensitive project and some data gets lost of compromised?
Who's responsible if my client's sensitive data gets lost, stolen or corrupted?
My ISP or the developer or server-hosting service they use?

I could see it working for larger firms where their systems are already internally networked and in some cases even operate on a basis like an internal cloud system with just access consoles that run all the software remotely from a particular employee's desk. But even in that situation, everything is still under the purview of the company and not an external entity.

For smaller companies, the problems just seem like they'll begin to multiply and not justify the cost of working in such a way.

[Jp1138]

Bricklyne wrote:
I thought that Google's Stadia project is no more.
Didn't they recently cancel the project? (or move "resources" to other development areas)?

As far as I know only the exclusive Stadia game development branch was axed. Stadia is still running.

For me the problem with SAAS is that you are prisoner of a fee you cannot afford not to pay, because you´d loose all your work. Technically it can work perfectly, but I would never use it if I can avoid it.