Trimble’s SketchUp has reached a significant milestone, surpassing one million active paying subscribers, according to a press release today. That number does not include users of the free version.
A million is a nice number and certainly worthy of a press release. However, it is a far cry from the numbers previously associated with SketchUp, which has been estimated as high as 38 million!
A Little History
SketchUp was launched in 2000 by @Last Software, acquired by Google in 2006 and then adopted by Trimble in 2012. SketchUp was quickly accepted at the onset due to its ease of use by architects. It could create 3D models of buildings with wondrous ease. Then it caught on with an unintended demographic, makers and hobbyists for mechanical design, What helped SketchUp’s popularity immensely was that it was totally free.
But Trimble, who acquired to gain access to architects, is not a non-profit. The company did not buy SketchUp to give it away. The free desktop version of SketchUp was gradually disappeared, replaced with a too-limited online version.
Clearly, Trimble goal is to have SketchUp used by every architect who can afford it. However, it seems that ratcheting the cost up from free, which is what most architects – and curmudgeon editors — remember SketchUp to be, is proving to be more difficult than Trimble would have liked.
A Few Hundred Dollars Would Not Kill You
In our humble opinion, $349/year is really not a lot to pay for what is still the easiest-to-use 3D architectural CAD program ever. Architects, known to be as penny-pinching as any job group, may just have to get over it.
To Trimble, we request that SketchUp be spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary, once again offering a free version with decent capability. The free version may not generate immediate revenue, but the goodwill and appeal to a universal demographic is worth much more than what can be extracted from a million architects. Only if Trimble is willing to do this long play will SketchUp be restored to its once-exalted heights.
