So the buzz about SolidWorks in the cloud and on the Mac is still a hot topic in the SolidWorks community so I wanted to give you a little of an update on timing of these products.

On the main stage during the General Session on Monday at SolidWorks WORLD 2010, SolidWorks Corporation showed off a “technology preview” of some projects that the development team have been and are working on.  These new products are being built off of the cloud computing functionality that is quickly becoming the standard in the computing industry.  The statement was made during the presentation that some of these ideas would be included in and shipped in products later this year.  So to clear up any questions or open holes from this statement I sent a quick email to Fielder Hiss, Vice President of Product Management at SolidWorks Corporation, and this is what he sent back to me.

On day 1 we showed a technology preview of different components that were built to leverage the cloud to solve design challenges.  As of today we have not yet decided how these technology components  will make their way into products or do we have a timeframe. 

On day 3 we talked about SolidWorks PLM and showed the first online service called Product Data Sharing.  This online, or cloud service, we expect to be available by the end of the year.

So, for all of you SolidWorks on a Mac or SolidWorks in the cloud hopeful you might have to wait some time to see where this all ends up.  This demonstration was strictly a look into what the development team is working on and I expect to see some of this functionality slowly get filtered into new and existing products that SolidWorks offers to its users in the future.

Let me know what you think of SolidWorks showing off products on the main stage that are still probably more than a couple of years away.  Was this a good move by SolidWorks or not?  I am interested to hear your thoughts.