As mentioned earlier, Fusion 360 Dashboard uses Internet (HTML/jQuery etc.) technologies under the hood. This is perfectly okay (if it doesn't show to the user), but I don't get why it needs to load resources s.a. pictures and script libraries off the Internet.
https://twitter.com/bmdesignhki/status/361215924633731072/photo/1
Fusion is not the snappiest application to launch. This may well be part of the reason. I'd simply put the used libraries etc. resources as part of the installed client, and access them locally.
Even if the files are cached (which I don't think they are - see the below search for .js files) simply checking that they haven't changed on the server would take some time.
$ find ~/Library/Application\ Support/Autodesk/ -name "*.js"
./webdeploy/69e5777f7670ab8fe6a5d402b114295c37eba7a4/Frameworks/Neutron.framework/resources/scripts/windows/shell_launch.js
./webdeploy/meta/streamer/20130607164600/resources/scripts/windows/shell_launch.js
I hope Autodesk is looking at this prior to the real release of the product. This could be tagged 'possible performance optimization'.
Launch test:
Fusion 360 client on Macbook Air (iCore 7) takes roughly 15-20 seconds to launch. That's long.
(Fusion 1.8.568, OS X 10.8.4)