VizTerra

Looks great, but I can’t stand subscription only services. That is an instant deal breaker for me and won’t even consider a software package that uses that business model. I know they are a sponsor and everything, but I know a bunch of firms and their IT guys who feel the same way.

Since it checks for subscription status/updates on start-up, one glitch with permissions/network and you are out of business. If the net/network goes down, you can still work with a licensed purchase. Need to work where there is no net, say, an airplaine, restaurant, or client’s house, you are SOL. With owning the license, you can upgrade it when YOU want if at all. I recall when a firm I worked for upgraded to ACAD 2009, it sucked so bad and was so unreliable, us powerusers downgraded back to 2008 until 2010 came along. Hard to do with a subscription and automatic updates as you cannot roll back the upgrade easily. At the same time, we switched to floating licenses hosted on the main server. Well, our satellite office had an internet outage and could not get to the main server for their license, so that office lost an entire days worth of work. The next week, they had their own license server.  We had issues as well with when the server went down. We used to be able to work locally off ther hard drive, but not with shared licenses. It only takes one small glitch and you are out of business, losing time, losing money. 

As far as constantly upgrading, I know some smaller firms still using ACAD 2008…they don’t need to upgrade and have saved a ton of money by not. A good rule of thumb is to upgrade every other release. That’s why subscritptions are bad…m’kay?