> The Professional tier is made for high-end 3D CAD, Creative Suite, GIS etc.
What I'd love is to use a virtual terminal that has every application possible pre-installed or available on demand and runs like a citrix application with payment by time/cpu or whatever makes sense.
So I want to use AutoCAD, I find it in the catalog of apps, use it for 20 minutes, pay 2 dollars or whatever. I want Visual Studio 2013, I find it in the catalog, use it for 2 hours, pay a dollar fifty.
Then all I need is a cheap laptop with a nice screen and I'm good for years and years.
Paperspace founder here. One of the things we are most excited about is rapidly evolving cloud licensing models. Adobe (among others) has paved the way for a more on-demand version like what you are describing. I think a lot of other companies will move in this direction as well. We definitely share your vision and hope to offer pre-configured machines as well as on-demand apps in the future. Also, you can clone a VM and distribute it really easily which could be interesting (a dumber approach to what you're talking about).
What about sharing - heavy - files with coworkers not using this app? What about uploading files? It feels to me like working in a bubble... but maybe I'm wrong.
How about some sort of dropbox like syncing? Put your files in a shared dropbox folder, sync dropbox folder on remote VM, save your work on remote VM when done, changes get synced back to shared dropbox folder.
Obviously not perfect and obviously problematic if lots of people try working on the same file at the same time, but should solve at least some of the problems.
No company can provide this because the kind of service you want needs to be licensed by the software creators: Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. I don't think it would be an easy job to convince these big companies.
What I'd love is to use a virtual terminal that has every application possible pre-installed or available on demand and runs like a citrix application with payment by time/cpu or whatever makes sense.
So I want to use AutoCAD, I find it in the catalog of apps, use it for 20 minutes, pay 2 dollars or whatever. I want Visual Studio 2013, I find it in the catalog, use it for 2 hours, pay a dollar fifty.
Then all I need is a cheap laptop with a nice screen and I'm good for years and years.