Hi Mike,

> The Cloud's only real purpose is control. So that large corporations can
> 'say so' and tell you what to buy and where to put your stuff.

There is definitely some of that in play, and really one big draw is not just to boss you around but also to be able to harvest and analyze your data in some way to be able to deliver targeted ads.

But also another factor yet is the cross-platform appeal, the idea that when your stuff is being run on the cloud and the UI being delivered to you through a web page, it's easier for you to access that from any number of devices or different machines. That part when it works can certainly be useful and if you use any type of webmail like hotmail or gmail then you're actually already participating in this style of cloud computing, they just don't charge you for it and instead focus on the revenue from advertisers.

Things that are more CPU intensive (which many things involving CAD can be) are not quite such an easy fit for that sort of model because you have to maintain a lot of server capacity and managing all of that is a lot of work and basically needs some kind of team dedicated just to that part of the infrastructure. And basically maintaining the equivalent of one full desktop machine's computing power on the server side is not very cost effective. For things like e-mail that requires such a low amount of CPU processing for every individual one that just one server machine can handle stuff for some thousands and thousands of users, while CAD stuff would have something like 2 users max out all the resources on one server machine already.

- Michael