Announcing new features to SketchUp 2019 and LayOut!

[DerekEdison]

@Bryceosaurus

Hey Derek

It’s a financial reason - Trimble has to pay yearly licensing fees for Add Location Imagery and the Large Area feature makes it very easy for people to import much more data. As a result, we’re not able to expand what we offer to perpetual license holders. Please stick with me for a few more lines as I explain further… We DO realize that many perpetual license holders also pay our yearly Maintenance and Support fees. The primary problem is that the perpetual license system in SketchUp can’t know whether a perpetual license holder is current on their M&S subscription. That really starts to matter as the desktop application ages. Think about users on SU 2017 and SU2018. We essentially provide perpetual access to what is now "basic "Add Location for those users at an ongoing cost to us. It also matters for piracy. We haven’t had a good way to block services like Add Location for pirates. So in order to protect our ability to best serve our most loyal customers, we decided to rebuild many of our business systems and move certain features to our subscription offerings.

So why didn’t you implement this as an extension that does check if I’m current on M&S? If I am, the large area import works. If I’m not, the core functionality can remain.