by Sam Scholes & Brock Vasic

What does Monday’s announcement mean for the future of SolidWorks? At the show we heard a lot about the future of SolidWorks, cloud computing, and all manner of new ways of doing things. Does that mean we’ll be seeing a native Mac version of SolidWorks? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be “No”. However despite that apparent disadvantage taking SolidWorks online and utilizing cloud computing seems to be even more promising, that is, if they can pull it off.

During the presentations on the future of SolidWorks they talked about other “cloud” programs like Google Docs and Gmail. While I love both of those services Google Docs has a long way to go before it will be able to compete head to head with Microsoft Office. Sure the online capabilities, the data storage, the ability to collaborate and share documents is awesome, but the sheer word processing and document editing capabilities fall short when compared to Microsoft Office. Web applications may be the future of computing but in my humble opinion that future has yet to be fully realized. –Sam