I have to vent here and then I’ll go away for good.
Sometime around 2010 I had a problem with 3DS Max. It wasn’t a big deal and I honestly don’t remember exactly what the issue was at this point, but I reached out to customer support and pleaded my case. I think it might have had something to do with them breaking up features across products (moving something from Max to Maya I think). I didn’t hear anything back for a few days, but one day during work my phone rang with a California number I didn’t recognize. It was the VP in charge of the development of Max at Autodesk. He introduced himself, stated that he appreciated the feedback, asked me some questions, and then invited me to become a beta tester for Autodesk.
Between 2010 and, I think, somewhere around 2020, I beta-tested all kinds of products for Autodesk. It was a fun experience. One of the most interesting parts of that experience were the design tests. Basically, they would set up a video conference where a team of developers would present you with multiple interface iterations of an internal build of a piece of software, and they’d give you control of their desktop, and they would ask you to do things and watch how you figured out the software. It was to make the tools more user-friendly. It was a bit of a strange experience getting used to people watching you fumble with some piece of software you’ve never seen before. They even gave us Amazon gift cards as payment for putting us through such an awkward experience.
I got really busy with work and couldn’t contribute anymore, but I’m still an avid Autodesk user and supporter of their products. Their software helped me transition away from Sketchup fully in 2018 (I used it heavily/daily at work from when @Last launched it until 2018). I really never intended to ever open SketchUp again. You can read my thread from 2018 regarding the terrain tools from Google being dropped. I’m not going to rehash that here, but with the current issue I encountered today, it really solidified that I made the right move.
As an end user and customer, I guess there is fine print in contracts. I’m sure there’s some legalese in the EULA that I agreed to in 2014/15 when I purchased my own license for Sketchup that absolves Trimble from having to provide me with anything really. No guarantees etc. and that somehow “maintenance” means being able to open the software at all. I also think this veers into the realm of a gray area when it comes to ownership of the software and whether we’re renting or buying it. A lot of that has gone away completely now with all the subscription models, and maybe I’m just hanging on to a time and concept that is outdated, but when I bought a “perpetual” license, I took that to mean “forever.” It wasn’t sold to me as “You can use the software for some undetermined period of time that might be 1 year or 3.”
Then there’s the human/moral side of things. This was my issue in 2018, and it’s my issue today. There are two ways to deal with customer issues. One is to try to accommodate them, and the other is to argue and get defensive with them. All I’ve ever encountered with Trimble is the latter. Or, at a minimum a dismissive “we ended support for it so you’re out of luck and we have no solution or suggestion to make it right.”
So whether it’s due to some 3rd party contract expiration with a data provider, or some technical depreciation of tools that support activating EOS products, there is the technical reason, and then there’s the way your support personnel handle those issues. In my case, they could’ve potentially fostered a good relationship with a customer that lasts a lifetime, but instead they chose to argue with me and refuse any kind of creative solution whatsoever. Both in 2018 and now again in 2024, Trimble’s only offer of support is that I pay more money.
What I don’t understand about this approach is that in either case (2018 or now), they could’ve made far more money off of me in the long run by retaining a customer than they might have lost by offering a discount on an upgrade. Not only that, but I think I’ve probably told this story to at least a dozen colleagues in the industry.
At this point I honestly regret ever doing business with Trimble and wish I had never built anything in the .skp format. At this point I’ll convert as much as I can during the trial and if I ever need something again I’ll either redo it from scratch in another software or pay a freelancer to convert an old file.
I’ve read several other threads from people going through this same issue. I suspect we’re a fairly small pool of users that got caught up in the transition and didn’t simply fork over the cash or weren’t on a subscription plan and got left hanging. Maybe that’s by design. They knew they’d have some attrition by making a policy to make no concessions to those who weren’t on subscription during the transition. If that’s correct I don’t understand the logic. I’ve spent 20x as much on subscriptions elsewhere and possibly would have with Trimble had they handled the case differently.
end of rant. delete if it violates terms, but maybe pass it on to whoever is calling the shots in support policy.