Anytime you have a direct quote it’s always good to include sources to back them up. Not that I’m doubting you exactly but just for thoroughness I decided to go back and try to find direct quotes that match what you are attributing to Dan here. This is what I found:
Claim:
Sources:
There are many other posts where they start to walk this back, and they give reasons for it. I’ll leave that as an exercise for people to go find on their own.
Claim:
Source:
The final word on the firmware release is here:
None of this is to “catch out” glowforge on any of this: these were early ideas and ambitions and were always subject to change. The claim that glowforge was baking the cost of cloud services into the price of their machines didn’t and could never have aged well, Glowforge had no way to know how cloud services and their economy would change over the years.
Anyway. There’s a lot in each of these threads, if you want to dig in and get a glimpse of what they were thinking and what we users were hoping for it’s fun to look at that snapshot.
Lastly:
This isn’t directly related to your post but it is an interesting sentiment that I think it’s important to remember:
The whole thread is worth reading, it’s a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Bear in mind that this was in 2015 which is very early days, but it is pretty good advice.