CAD in the cloud

I have talked in this blog a number of times about the potential for design applications to be delivered as online solutions (CADaaS, BIMaaS), where the application and associated data is hosted ‘in the cloud’, and some of my designer friends have pooh-poohed the idea. Autodesk, however, has at least been experimenting with the idea – in a post Try AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit without installing them, Autodesk Labs blogger Scott Shappard invites people within 1,000 miles of the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a technology preview which allows users to access these products online using only a small client application.