I have this request because of 17 years of frustration. Keep me and others from dropping through the cracks.
I am 79 and have broad interests, but generally due to corporate marketing policies I drop through the cracks with no satisfactory solution.
People like me have interest in many technologies and have inadequate access to almost all of them for no good reason.
Taking SketchUp as an example. I last used it several years ago, and once I finish my current project I probably won’t use it again for a year or two.
The frustration is the Go subscription for which I forked over a bit over $100 for Sketchup to write a single personal white paper to a college professor friend. It’s important to me to do a good job because I may also pass it on to other friends and retired former associates just for the joy of sharing it with them.
After spending almost a month re-learning to use SketchUp and also a free technical writing software I learned from scratch, I have been doing a beautiful job.
But now the apparent technical limitations of Go make it very hard for me to fix a simple technical glitch that prevents me from having nice tag>>edit>>line-format clean dotted lines because they are messed up because auto-fracturing of a large number of criss-crossed lines that need to be welded together. But I can’t have the Weld extension.
The extension isn’t primarily the problem, but the fact is that most lower level software suites there are always a number of glitches and shortcomings that mean that the higher price software is needed.
But again people like me always drop through the cracks and suffer a lot because forking over $200+ more in order to get nice dots and dashes for a personal project once every few years is not practical.
The galling part of this problem is that it would cost the corporation almost nothing to provide access to 2 or 3 extensions or whatever a well thought out solution they could provide.
Education SketchUp is one thing and I commend SketchUp for providing. But I feel left out and frustrated like the many out there that are regressively locked out of those tools.
I’m not going to kick the bucket because I can’t get access to my problem, but this problem has smacked me in the face a dozen times or more in the past 15 or 20 years when I took interest in something like Adobe, Band-in-the-Box, Mathcad, Vegas Studio, Eclipse, etc.
it puzzles me why companies don’t provide software that won’t cost them anything but would give exposure to their products?
Here is a thought: I know for a fact that providing one or two a full capability projects to a low paying customer once or twice a year would cost the company almost nothing and would lead to to some additional business. Even providing good software for non-commercial use would benefit the company.
I saw this happen with Cincom Smalltalk who for years provided full blown full featured Smalltalk for non-commercial use for FREE for years next to their almost identical paid commercial product. They have managed to keep going commercially for many years in spite of the fact that other Smalltalk vendors such as Digitalk and Parc Place Systems disappeared.
