To me, SketchUp’s greatest features were (1) MacOS and (2) not owned by AutoDesk, and Google’s greatest gift to the development team is that they did not sell the code base to AutoDesk, who would have surely euthanized it and disbanded the team. This, tho, feels like the same result, this feels like the SketchUp group has reached some sort of critical mass where extracting money from the user base becomes an end it itself, to support a large staff performing increasingly irrelevant activity adjacent to the thing that we are here for, the model editor and layout application. I’m not sure the decision makers valued the amount of success they owe to not operating as AutoDesk does.
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