Scott,
Nice to hear from 'the source'.
I have been involved with a large number of Kitchen manufacturers and their customers for some time, and attitudes in the 'commercial sector' never cease to surprise me.
The problem is that a lot of the manufacturers have no in-house software expertise, have little IT savy and are not interested in spending money with 3rd parties to 'help' the retailer sell their products, they expect the retailer to find the resources to promote/sell.
This has made it possible for other software providers to make money from two avenues - the sale of their software and the sale of catalogues of particular manufacturers products. And these are not cheap.
From my experience I think that there is a vast potential for Sketchup in this market (as well as other similar markets), but to exploit it would involve investing time (and hence capital) in developing the necessary tools (such as libraries of components correctly configured). With no potential for software revenue, the only way to recoup this capital investment would be for the library developer to charge either manufacturers (unlikely) or their customers a nominal fee for the libraries, but with no real 'protection' system available for them to prevent the libraries being freely passed around - there would be few, if any, people prepared to do it.
This is a shame, because for the sake of an optional facility for the 'locking' of access to DC attributes everyone loses out - the retailer, the manufacturer and Sketchup. But I guess the addition of such a feature is no trivial matter.
With regard to the amount of detail in the DC, the two main markets for a 'planning system' are.
The large national/international Manufacturers,
The small self build studios.
The large cabinet manufacturers would not be interested in having a high level of detail (such as drilling positions etc) as they have their own in-house production systems for taking orders through the manufacturing process. They are not even interested in recieving drawings from the retailer (in most cases). What they are interested in is having an electronic order listing the codes of their products.
Their retailers are also not interested in the assembly detail, what they need is a realistic accurately sized model (usually fixed sizes as manufaturers in the main only make fixed sizes) that allows them to accurately lay out the plan that looks good to impress the customer. They also need a quick and easy way of 'costing' out the layout to quote the customer, and also list their costs to monitor the profit. (Having the 'cost' prices in the DC to facilitate the latter is another reason for reluctance to share them freely in the market). Finally they want an order for the manufacturer.
The small self build studios are a different market with different needs. They want the flexibility of parametric re-sizing of cabinets to suit the customers room layout (now possible with DC), they would want cutting lists if they make their own cabinets as opposed to buying them in, and they may also want a much higher level of detail for manufacture (such as shelf and door hole positions etc.)
Over the next few weeks, for my own purposes, I will be intially looking at ways to use Sketchup to offer solutions in the latter of these two markets which will include specially targeted training material as a large part of this market has little or no 'CAD' experience.
