Wishlist SU 8... Let's not !
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Tomot, careful with your commas there, using your numbers annual SU sales would account for $500,000,000 or 1/40th the revenue from advertising. Certainly not an amount to sniff at.
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I guess it's kind of obvious, but people like you and me will stop using it and find something better if they don't fix some of these problems. I agree about the High Poly issue, and also to make things more efficient for ruby programmers, because if they fixed those two issues, things could move along nicely without worrying about google... But remus is right, sketchup needs something big to stop it becoming and artifact (" oh I remember sketchup, it was good for push and pull, and drawing lines, but development slowed, and I found some other program to model with that had what I needed) that's my opinion anyway
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It is not a question of getting par with the income of their advertising.
The important thing is: if it is feasible, it is feasible. Period!
If I run a business and product A earns me 200 % and product B earns me 130 %, there still is no reason to abandon product B.
Profit is profit.Autodesk isn't doing that bad in the CG industry is it? So it can be feasible.
Sketchup Pro maybe is a bit of a niche at the moment, but so was Googles search engine before it exploded...
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Well ... what did they expect? "Whoa! Automatic line-breaking! We gotta get updates for the whole office!"
Looking back, I still find it stunning what they managed to come up with after two years of development.
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@unknownuser said:
It is not a question of getting par with the income of their advertising.
I agree. I don't expect Google to tell us but it would be nice to know how much money is needed to continue developing Sketchup to the level we all want, and are SU Pro licenses able to pay for that? I suspect they don't.
@unknownuser said:
I heard the rumor that SU7 pro is selling badly. The uptake is apparently not as expected. That certainly does not help.
That was the fundamental flaw in Googles business model; put just about everything in the free version too. The pros can pay for Layout.
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It's funny how things workout... when SU 7 was released, me and some others that were saying that it was a bad released, were "atacked" by a lot of users that called us nuts and telling that there were many "under the hood" upgrades that couldn't be seen in SU7 and that we should be thankfull to google for "their hard work"... and i'm still waiting for an (any) article that would show me that amazing new things that can be done in SU7.
Under the hood...lol...under the hood upgrades it's a phrase from the car world (i have a passion with automotive design) that means that a new car can look like it's previous versions but inside him it has a completly new and more powered engine. Well, SU7 it's the oposite...it looks diferent with some visual tuning(some blue icons and new startup window), it has some new turbos on it's 20 year old engine, so it's a litle faster but breaks more frequently and consumes a lot more fuel (bugsplats and "white window of doom"), sure we can have litle more stability with larger tyres and a harder suspension (ruby) but that will only hide that the car base is old (more tools with ruby but running single core as the rest of the program) and won't still make him as good as the rest of the cars released today...
So right now i see SU7 has a super tuned version of SU4 (the first with rubys) that for more (suposed) speed and stability (7 it's almost as fast as 4...that is 6 years older) lost some of his engine features (shadow problem with the missing carmack's reverse option).
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I like your analogy...
It looks a little different, sounds a little wilder, probably runs a little different, but it's still a Beetle.
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Maybe sounds a little silly and utopic....but I am wondering:
Is there anything we, as a community, can do to help Google spicing up the development of Sketchup? -
All I hope is that when we all migrate elsewhere, that we all go the same place.
You guys are great and I enjoy this forum a ton. While I spend a lot of time at other software's forums, I always go here first every morning.
It will be a shame when the SU community withers down to hobbyists, and I have no doubt that that is going to happen.
I voted for end of the line, and what I meant is that I will hold on for a little while longer, but if SU goes another 2 years before a paltry tweak (I can't even call SU 7 an upgrade) with no improvement to the core, I will have been long gone by then.
To jump on the analogy wagon, I feel like SU was the first leather ski boot that had a buckle or two attached to it. Soon, hard plastic boots start to become available. So, SU gets a couple more buckles, but you still have to lace up the liner and they still flex way too much. Of course, the "purists" insist that the plastic boots are too uncomfortable and heavy and clunky and that a "real" skier can still do amazing things in the leather boots. Fast forward a couple more years and there is no sight of a leather boot anywhere. Gone like the puffin. I don't want more buckles on my flappy, non-waterproof, sloppy leather boots! I want a cutting edge, injection molded F1 plastic boot, with camber and flex adjustment, custom molded footbeds, and thermomolded liners.
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@kwistenbiebel said:
Maybe sounds a little silly and utopic....but I am wondering:
Is there anything we, as a community, can do to help Google spicing up the development of Sketchup?Seriously, I think we all know the answer is no.
Remember when CraigD was our link to the SU google world? He was enthusiastic, super helpful, and fast tracked issues he could recreate straight to the coders. He obviously was passionate about the product and actively cared about the problems we were finding.
So, what did google do? They transfered him to a different department and snuffed out our only real link to google. Last I heard, he was populating google earth with buildings. Great job for him, I am sure, but very disheartening for me. At that moment, I felt that google had showed us their cards and we were the losers.
I have nothing to substantiate my suspicions, but it would not surprise me at all that Craig was transfered because he was sending a message to us, the users, that our issues where being worked on and were a priority for google when, in fact, google had no intention to address any of our problems.
Style maker was way more of a priority, apparently. For what it's worth, I have never even loaded Style maker or Layout, which right off the bat makes most of the development of SU for the last 3 years completely useless to me. I just want a SU that can handle even a few million polys, and not crash the 3 or 4 times a day that it does now. It would be nice if SU even kind of kept up with me and my development as an artist.
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@unknownuser said:
Style maker was more of a priority, apparently. For what it's worth, I have never even loaded Style maker or Layout, which right off the bat makes most of the development of SU for the last 3 years completely useless to me.
Same here. Never opened Layout and that other thing you mention.
Although, I must admit that Google was trying to please a crowd back then.
Remember the 'Grizzly' concept, already rumoured in the @Last period?
Google promised that Grizzly would be further developed when they took over from @Last.They kept on putting effort into it...
Making Layout/Stylebuilder is more comprehensible to develop than to make efforts to disect the sketchup core and improve it.Google is beating around the bush.....
They could at least play open book and communicate the situation : 'We can't do it'
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silence speaks volumes....
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Silence tells us about google policy.
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@unknownuser said:
Remember when CraigD was our link to the SU google world? He was enthusiastic, super helpful, and fast tracked issues he could recreate straight to the coders. He obviously was passionate about the product and actively cared about the problems we were finding.
This comes back to my point about a "community manager", can't we at least suggest this to Google before we decide whether or not they are bothered about SU anymore?
Incidentally I think I had 3 crashes today in quick succession SU7, so I opened SU6, no problems.
Also, Styles, I do sometimes use them for work (but probably, mainly, because after about 10 years of using 3d software my rendering still sucks). I think Google maybe saw Styles as a Piranesi style tool that they thought would be highly sort after.
I would have to agree that Layout is still a white elephant. DoubleCad has stepped up to be what Layout should have been; a proper cad program. So google have missed the boat there too.All in all, I don't think they see Sketchup as an architectural/design tool. I hope we don't see it get amalagamated into Google docs as a gimmick.
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Sorry to keep banging on, but in an effort to bring perspective to this topic, please consider:
The opening statement on Google's Corporate page:
@unknownuser said:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
On Google's milestones page, there is no mention of Sketchup.
But also consider these quotes (italicised = my emphasis):
@unknownuser said:
Google's managers identified two initial opportunities for generating revenue: search services and advertising.
@unknownuser said:
However, no matter how distant Google's business model grows from its origins, the root remains providing useful and relevant information to those who are the most important part of the ecosystem – the millions of individuals around the world who rely on Google search to provide the answers they are seeking.
@unknownuser said:
As Google expands its development team, it continues to look for those who share an obsessive commitment to creating search perfection and having a great time doing it.
@unknownuser said:
Google continues to think about ways in which technology can improve upon existing ways of doing business. New areas are explored, ideas prototyped and budding services nurtured to make them more useful to advertisers and publishers.
@unknownuser said:
What's next from Google? It's hard to say. We don't talk much about what lies ahead, because we believe one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise.
@linea said:
All in all, I don't think they see Sketchup as an architectural/design tool.
but maybe they could be persuaded that it could support their opening statement:
@unknownuser said:
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
in which case the onus is on SU aficionados to explain how Sketchup models can be incorporated into, say, building industry processes to make product images and data universally accessible and useful to owners, designers, installers and users. For the models to be useful they must be reusable in assemblies of larger models (building designs and so on). In return manufacturers benefit from cheap, automated advertising on the UI just when the user requests it. (Compare AdWords and AdSense).
If Sketchup can become part of the organisation of the world's information then many will benefit from use of its models and modelmakers in particular will benefit from a vastly increased market. I am sure "high poly count" will be provided immediately sufficient searchers demand it.
Che
edit - final quote
@unknownuser said:
Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer –- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -– and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).
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how does one communicate with google about these issues?
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@l.frisken said:
how does one communicate with google about these issues?
I guess first there is a need to demonstrate a consensus within SCF ...
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As Alan Fraser has pointed out before, the SCF represents only a fraction of SU users. For us to have any leverage with Google surely we need to get the PushPullbar community, Google Sketchup group users and most importantly the silent majority onside too. Quite a task. But it might be that there is a very significant number of people who are perfectly happy with Sketchup because at their level of use they probably don't run into any problems.
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I heard the rumour that SU7 pro is selling badly. The uptake is apparently not as expected. That certainly does not help.
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@linea said:
... For us to have any leverage with Google surely we need to ...
.I have never said anything about leverage; what I am talking about is using whatever we can offer, however small, to help bring one of Google's "blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus" for mutual interest and eventual benefit of Society as a whole.
If that sounds a bit high-minded, how about: we introduce new ways to attract revenue from search and advertising; in return they upgrade the software to improve our SU model-based businesses.
The question is who is "we".
Chris
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