The lack of updates and communication is extremely off-putting. There seem to be a few possibilities:
- The Good: Geomagic Design is undergoing a major rework to become a more future-looking part of 3D System's overall software suite. 3D Systems (vs. Alibre) seems to have a corporate philosophy of not communicating much at all about ongoing/future work, so existing users are left completely in the dark.
- The Bad: Geomagic Design has entered a quiet end-of-life phase. Just barely enough engineering effort to satisfy existing maintenance and support obligations, but little active development.
- The Ugly: Geomagic Design development and staffing have already been terminated/reassigned, and 3D Systems continues to accept maintenance with no good-faith effort to sustain the product. If a critical Windows update rendered GD non-operational tomorrow, we'd all be up the proverbial creek.
I feel like "The Good" scenario is an extreme longshot at this point. As this poll indicates, the lack of any updates or news for well over a year has got to be causing significant hemorrhaging of previously loyal customers and customer confidence. There's virtually no risk of
The Osborne effect at this point, so 3D Systems would be foolhardy to not make a public announcement to stem the exodus.
I also suspect that the worst-case scenario of "The Ugly" is unlikely. More likely, GD will probably keep ticking along in some operational form for years, gradually undergoing bit-rot.
For my part, I'm not currently planning on renewing my maintenance. The only question in my mind: Will I still be able to use GD in read-only capacity after maintenance expiration? Either way, that mostly just changes my window to decide on and migrate to a competitor. My work in GD is primarily a long-term ongoing side-business effort; not one which is making any significant income yet. I've been following OnShape, and they're doing some really great work in building a new ground-up CAD suite, but they're still lacking one feature critical to my work. That's scheduled to land this year, but it'll be a race between 1) that feature landing, 2) my testing it and being able to migrate existing work, and 3) my GD maintenance renewal deadline.
As someone else said, above, I don't love the increase in annual cost of OnShape vs. GD maintenance. I may mitigate that at first by going month-to-month; my availability to work on the side-biz varies seasonally, so I can use that to my advantage. If OnShape introduced a plan w/ private documents, customized to smaller users like myself, I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.