In general, Razor42 post does not warrant anything beyond a mention to the "Everyone Is Now Dumber" clip from Billy Madison (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcjIestFVOc).

Unfortunately, inside that post there is a very dangerous deliberate lie. I realized that it is possible that readers of this thread have a naive idea of what a cloud-based is, how it is structured and how it works so, in order dispel that lie (and to provide further nightmare fuel) I will briefly talk about this evil brain vomit called cloud-based application (developing which is incidentally my day job).

Interestingly, there are two 3D related cloud-based application that we can examine: Tinkercad by Autodesk (evil? check, anti-customer? check, Autodesk? check) and Clara.io. They are both cloud-based 3D modeling applications; Tinkercad is more CAD-like, Clara.io more similar to standard polygonal modeling applications.

Tinkercad is available here (https://www.tinkercad.com/) and Clara.io here (https://clara.io/). I use "available" with comedic purpose, because there is nothing, in those two applications, that is available in the conventional sense. What you do with those applications is to register to their respective web sites and then navigate (with your web browser) to appropriate URL, login and begin work with them. Nothing at all is installed on your computer, the user interface part (HTML and Javascript) is loaded by your broser and executed inside it; everything else (processing, data storage and data itself) resides inside the cloud. Unless you are logged into your account, you can do nothing for the simple reason that there is nothing (either data or executables) on your computer. You can see by yourself how the thing ticks watching two videos, one for Tinkercad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwjWT-EvKSU) and one for Clara.io (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EF-T0moiGg). Going back to DAZ, the web-based version of Studio was announced years ago and never afterwards did DAZ officially state that the idea had been killed. So, the "distribution of content would be a nighmare" lie, is just that, a lie, since a cloud-based application is all about not distributing either content or execution (and Razor42 is certainly well aware of this).

The continued DAZ indifference to those pointing out that the DRM scheme is leaky is a dead giveaway that DAZ sees no need for a strong DRM scheme... in Studio, which can only be rationally explained by a future in which the Studio we know is a tool reserved for content developers and is as embargoed as nowadays are HD tools. For everybody outside the PAs elite, the logical final step is a super-duper Platinum club, with access to DAZ Cloud, with content and rendering capabilities, accessed with the web-based Studio version.

Piracy is killed, since DAZ content never physically leave DAZ controlled servers and, as much important, users are completely hostage of DAZ. When DAZ changes PC fee, users can either suck it up and pay or end their subscription, loosing access to everything. Did you notice how many people recently wrote posts to the tune of "I have enough content for 10 years, I can wait"? with a cloud architecture you do not wait. Either you pay or you change hobby. In general, subscription-based software, software-as-service, is the high tech version of a mob racket: pay or else, with the added bonus that the scheme is even legal ;-).

Only DAZ vendors (like Razor42), mesmerized with the naive dream of fabulous revenues thanks to the elimination of piracy and the rackeeteering scheme imposed on users can salute this future as advisable; everybody else has to loose from it. I wrote naive dream because when such situation is established/is being established a big market opportunity for a different approach rises and market opportunities are are always filled. Just an example: in the prehistory of computing some compiler vendors tried to make developers pay royalties for the programs they distributed: immediately, other vendors went in the opposite direction (the one which is standard since decades) and those leeches are nothing more an irrelevant footnote in the history of computing.