Madness, they say. Pure madness. The CAD pundit corps, as a whole, sees the Google acquisition of SketchUp (we now gladly retire the too-cute corporate name @Last Software) as daft. I see it as deft.
Bless their nit-picking hearts, my CAD media brethren, and our peers in the wider spheres of journalism, are looking at this through CAD vendor-tinted glasses. They see a small company trying to make a buck selling really cool 3D design software getting acquired by a giant that doesn’t sell software. (Well, they do, but it is a tiny portion of revenue.) It makes no sense if your only metric is selling design tools.
Google is not acquiring SketchUp so it can join the Open Design Alliance and compete with Autodesk. It is acquiring SketchUp so it can move forward with its corporate mission statement. As it says on the Google corporate page, “Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Part of fulfilling the mission is to encourage a million non-employees to backfill a virtual world—Google Earth—with models of the world’s infrastructure. All of us in AEC understand what a monstrous amount of data it takes to represent built assets. What better way to organize and make accessible all that data than to pick up a really cool, easy to use 3D design tool and help it become a global standard for illustrating Google Earth?
I believe the SketchUp guys (that’s a gender-neutral term in this context, by the way) when they say things will only get better for existing SketchUp users. But I wouldn’t be surprised if SketchUp follows the Google Earth path after that technology was acquired from Keyhole. There will be a free version, and a for-sale professional version.
