CAD: From the CAD Cloud to the Crowd, Let's Get To It ...

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Every place you turn these days something has moved to the cloud. One day it is music, the next day it is video. Now even our work places are slowing moving into the land of silver linings. Every year there are more and more CAD assets, services, and applications migrating to the cloud model of storage and processing. Now the CAD giant Autodesk is accelerating the CAD presence in the cloud with its various cloud-based services.

Path to the Cloud

Here at Kung Fu Drafter we cannot say that we are surprised to see these trends accelerating and becoming pivot points in the CAD world. As a group, CAD professionals are very technologically forward thinking people. So it seemed only natural that we welcome these new trends in distributed services with welcome arms. But, has the cloud brought all it can to CAD? We don't think so. Not at all.

So we put on our Kung Fu thinking caps and began to ponder. Then it dawned on us. We think the cloud has far more to offer. Of course, you might be thinking that we expect greater processing power in the cloud to move our most powerful applications off-site. While we think that is probably in the not too distant future, we want something more down to earth in the interim. We want more collaboration.

To The Crowd and Beyond

Here at Kung Fu Drafter we see a near future where Facebook-like communities are able to easily help each other with production issues. We want to see a time when you can be closing in on a deadline and leave at the end of the day. We want to be able to scan our mark-ups and our files and one of our friends in another time zone or country can help us out in their free time. We want to be able to crowd source our overflow of work and be able to assist others with their work as a purely generosity based exchange. Sure, it sounds like a no-brainer, but no-brainer or not, it is what we want.

Now that the cloud has come to CAD, we want to know what our readers want from it. If you could have whatever you want, and a popsicle, what would that be? Leave us a comment below and blow us away ...

- KFD -

Image credits: Schick, Ian Britton, and Sara Schroeder.