I’m personally on the other side of this discussion. I think the cloud is an amazing tool. Would I put proprietary data on it worth “billions”? No. But there are plenty of other non-cloud lasers that do everything the GF does (except the etching hand doodles thing, which I’m not sure is useful in pharmaceuticals). That being said, this topic has also been discussed in a couple of other threads.
Here:
Since all of the software to run the GlowForge exists on the cloud, does that mean that the designs I input to it will be stored on the cloud somewhere? Or will the cloud simply do the processing without storing any information?
I’ve put a lot of time and effort coming up with designs for leather work. Will my custom designs be susceptible to theft?
Here:
Yes, it does. It the Cloud ever inaccessible? I need to have a WIFI connection to use at all times, true? There is no USB port?
And here:http://community.glowforge.com/t/cloud-and-ip/703http://community.glowforge.com/t/offline-use/337
----And finally, if you are really set on getting out of the cloud, they talk about it here.
We’ve heard a ton of amazing feedback from our community in the 12 or so hours since Glowforge has launched, and one question stood out to us: what if you buy a Glowforge, and something happens to us?
This came up both in person at MakerCon while we demo’d the unit and online, particularly in the lively discussion on Hacker News. Because Glowforge is powered by the cloud, it’s an important question. Long term, we’re working on some cool solutions, but short term, here’s a commitment we’ll make …