You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future
If this happens, will it be a mass exodus to Linux/Mac? Or will people just live with it? The fact that the Steam Deck has shown great promise in playing games on Linux has made me reconsider Windows yet again.
That’s financially untenable. Average cost to retrain on a new system is between 500-1000 hours to equivalent competency, per user, not including translation and recreation of new templates and automated processing routines - which are the backbone of modern engineering and architectural practices. At an average billing rate of $150/hr, that’s around $100,000 economic cost *per employee * just in lost time, plus actual training budget and software licenses.
Moving systems in established engineering businesses is wildly expensive and disruptive. I’ve worked through a couple in other offices, and had to navigate one or two in my own office. I would retire tomorrow rather than have to move my office to a new CAD system, and I don’t have nearly the legacy files of a larger firm.