SketchUp still has value, but SketchUp plugins are quickly losing theirs. In the next few years, AI may be able to recreate most plugins and eventually build software similar to SketchUp itself.
Trimble may have a limited window to sell while SketchUp’s value remains high. If someone like Elon Musk purchased it and made it free, SketchUp could remain widely used for decades because there would be little reason to replace something already available for free.
Would selling now be safer than waiting for AI alternatives to weaken its value?
I don’t think Elon is interested in a software like sketchup. Trimble has made some mistakes, the biggest one is for me is charging for students licenses, Autodesk and its softwares are free for university students, Archicad is also free and it’s easy to get a license that last 2 years, SketchUp charges like $50 for a year and in some places it’s almost impossible to get an student license. Students are future customers, architecture is one of the most expensive careers, you can easily spend $100 on cardboards, balsa, cutters and a lot of materials to make models so paying for a software is not what most students want. Also the SketchUp for schools version should be the desktop version, the web version lacks of a lot of features and you can’t install plugins on it.
It would be great if a foundation like Blender is created to make SketchUp open source but still keeping the development, blender keeps improving almost every month, they listen to their users, Trimble takes a lot of time to develop tools or features requested by the customers, and lately they have focused a lot on AI, there are a lot of AI tools, free and paid, I don’t want more AI. I’d prefer to have tools that are available only on windows on MacOS, like Gaussian splats, Revit importer and scan essentials, also unify the UI, almost two years ago was released a SketchUp labs for MacOS with the redesigned UI, most of the testers liked it and praised it, but since then it has been stuck and labs now has mostly AI tools to test.
hahahaha yes but it would also make it racist and then make it loose 50% of its market value.
man, just take a break, you shouldn’t try to use your brain on weekend, it seems to hurt. take some paracetamol. it won’t make you autistic, I swear.
between your “people who don’t want to rush into AI and wait and see are bad because they cause society to not rush into AI” and now “daddy musk should buy sketchup and make it free”, I’m now considering brain damage. have you hit your head recently ?
That part is on me. I had seen a story claiming that Elon Musk wanted to buy Photoshop and make it free, but after checking, it appears the story was false.
So why would someone even contemplate buying it, especially if they’re just going to make it available for free?
Have you considered the value may not be the software itself, but the collective innovative input of the developers and users that make it a tool worth using?
If 1 billion people all shout at the AI and say I want my software to do this, then what will it deliver? That seems a risky prospect to me.
Blender is free, yet its developers, artists, add-on creators, and users form one of the strongest 3D communities in the world. Making the software free did not make that community less valuable. It helped the community grow.
Then you should write your own code (with AI of course!) spending thousands of hours and millions of tokens to create a professional level software and then give it away.
And while you are working on giving away your software I’m sure there are thousands of community members who would love to have affordable housing. Perhaps if enough people start yelling about it you will give away luxury villas and hotels in Thailand to anyone who asks?
Building expensive things and giving them away is not an equivalent comparison. Software can be free to users while still having paid developers and sustainable funding.
And just to be clear, I build these tools for my own use. Once they work, I would rather share them than let them sit unused.
You think software is not expensive and that it should just be given away? You are using a highly subsidized nearly free resource to create your plugins. You are standing next to a lake at a public beach during a heat wave saying ‘I’ve built this beach, please swim and cool your self off.’
My grandmother received housing through the Soviet system because of her years of work. The home was not free to build. It was simply funded and distributed through a different model.
So the real question is not whether software or housing costs money. Of course it does. The question is who funds it and how people receive access.
I’m sorry, but I don’t share that view. I find this version unpleasant to look at and use. Its main advantage was unifying the interfaces between Mac and Windows, but it did so by adopting primarily the “ugly” aspects of the switch to Qt.
The features are there, but it lacks the proper UI/UX work needed to make it a modern piece of software—one that is visually polished and consistent with the iPad and Web versions…
True, but its development by the foundation isn’t free. Without its €279,250 in monthly donations, nothing would be possible.
This means people worked hard to defend this business model and build up that donor base—which represents a tiny fraction of the total number of users.
