Chromebook is a mature platform which is dominating K-12 market in US and heavily spreaded in SMB market today. A bunch of school districts were fully migrated from Windows on Chromebooks (many of them have no Windows machines anymore).
We have used SketchUp for a while but now migrated to OnShape only because SketchUp have no any possibility to run on Chrome OS.
I think that If you make a native Chrome App version of SketchUp then you can return you market share quickly because we already know your nice app.
Any unofficial responses worth nothing about this subject.
Only CAD maker should take a decision and present its plans as official press release to be or not to be in the market.
The most important things which should be deeply evaluated are:
- The great part of SketchUp user base are ex-Google SketchUp users which broadly adopted Web application concept and have more Chromebook devices than Windows and Mac fans in common.
- All major CAD vendors offer a special version for Education with very affordable price because it is a main method to grown its user base with new engineers.
- WebGL is coming for production (in Q1 2016 WebGL 2.0 will be introduced). Many major Graphic software vendors (Autodesk, Unity) are fully committed this standard and have official plans to make full Web application (WebGL) versions of their main products in Q2/Q3 2016.
I think that if Trimble will not offer (or at least do not publish official plans) to unveil WebGL version of SketchUp in Q3/Q4 2016 then Trimble would be kicked out from Education market and will lost any possibility to attract any new clients for years because all new engineers will be fans of WebGL CAD systems from other vendors.
SU is a client application - needing to be installed on its host computer which in turn need to meet hardware requirements to run the program. Chromebooks fall short on the hardware requirements.
Look at a Chrome app like Chrome Remote Desktop. Check if SU can be installed on a server the kids can access through their Chromebook.
Clouds and Web applications were trends for years.
I had used SketchUp on Windows before I have migrated all my stuff into Google Cloud. There are no reasons for ordinal users to go at SketchUp forum after migration into the Cloud and vote for something because they are using other product already. For this reason there are no polls on a SketchUp forum that can count how many users have a platforms which Trimble don’t support and how many users Trimble already lost for this reason.
I am planning deployment cloud solutions for entire organisations and seek for proven CAD system for Web. If Trimble would be capable to deliver some WebGL app then it can have opportunity to hold current customers and even grab some market share. If Trimble will not present working WebGL app till Q4 2016 then it may lost many many customers at once.
Any “remote display” solutions are not viable for Chromebooks for licensing an support purposes if placed at home (they are double cost of hardware and software).
Even Adobe Creative Suite applications that Adobe is streaming for school Chromebooks from their servers are pain workaround because they require great Internet bandwidth.
There are few pure WebGL CAD applications already and we have chosen OnShape. However, as I wrote earlier, WebGL 2.0 standard is coming and bunch of major vendors have plans to make a pure WebGL version. I think that CAD market will change dramatically in 2016-2017. Who want not to jump into this Web vagon may lose the train forever.