Monday morning, Sandra and I (the token married couple on the team) drove right past the Google office on our way to work. It's a new day for SketchUp, and for the SketchUp crew. With “the deal” officially closed, all 30+ of us have moved to a building that will be SketchUp Worldwide HQ—for about three months, at least. They're building us a brand new office right here in Boulder, Colorado; until it's ready, we're in temporary digs.
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| John (our fearless product manager) and Susan (the scale figure in every new SketchUp model) are neighbors here in Temporary Cubeland. |
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| Laura (and her million-dollar smile) helps customers from the Sales Quad. |
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| We sent an expedition out to buy nerd toys for the office. Mission accomplished. |
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| Our QA (Quality Assurance) lab includes Brad, who looks surprisingly lifelike for a robot. |
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| The engineering team has been working out. |
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| Our new office has lots of empty space. Floor hockey, anyone? |
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| My Junk Fort (accumulated over eight years, three companies and four offices) keeps Tyson at a safe distance. Tyler and Jody gossip in the background. |
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| Simone demonstrates why he's the new QA manager by crawling under his desk to plug something into the adjacent wall. |
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| The Tent Room makes dedicated outdoorsmen like Mark feel right at home. |
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| We have a couple of billion pairs of socks with the wrong logo on them. |
Our new friends at Trimble have bent over backwards to make us feel welcome. Punching in on Monday, we all found shiny new computers on our desks. Last week I was using a three-year-old laptop with a broken USB port, a twenty minute battery and a Yucatan-sized dent. Now I'm rocking a 15" Macbook Pro with a half-terabyte solid state drive and 22-inch rims. I'm ashamed to admit it, but my new hardware makes me feel taller.
Igor, Andrew and Tyler spent last week in California working on the transfer of SketchUp's intellectual property from Mountain View (Google) to Sunnyvale (Trimble). Even in this era of Wi-Fi and bluetooth and NFC and Dropbox and general cloud worship, the best way to make sure SketchUp's bits and bytes moved safely from seller to buyer was to load the whole shebang onto a couple of monster hard drives and chauffeur them down the freeway.
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| Igor (tennis sweater) and Andrew (fauxhawk) with two members of Google's IT staff outside of Trimble HQ with armfuls of SketchUp source code. Horse and buggy not visible in this frame. |
One last thing: I know that lots of you are concerned about how things are going to go now that we’re part of Trimble. The outpouring of “Don’t hurt my SketchUp!” sentiment after we made the announcement in April was completely understandable—and completely understood. You’ll have to take our word for it, but so far, things are looking good. If the way our team has been treated provides any clues (and I think it does), SketchUp’s future is very bright, indeed. The folks at Trimble “get it” in a way that’s hard to explain.
At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, the Trimblers I’ve met are kind, generous, smart and above all, genuinely well-meaning. A few of them have even joined us at the new office for the summer; that didn’t happen in 2006 when Google bought us. In the next month or so, I’ll use this blog to re-introduce some of the SketchUp team, as well as the other Trimble folk who are working closely with us.
Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist
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33 comments :
Love the bootleg Action figures :D !
Gahhh I want to work with you guys so bad!! Been working with Sketchup for over seven years now and can't imagine my (3D) world without it. Helping develop new versions would be a dream come true!
Does this mark the last "Official Google SketchUp Blog" post? And if so, are you moving platforms or staying with blogger?
"Nerd" toys? Ahaha! I am sure you meant "Nerf", right?
I use the program at home and work. Am saving money up to buy the full version for $499. Don't change the price up! If any, can y'all reduce the price? But great program - we use it at an architectural office for initial design / renders. I use it at home to design all my house plans.
all the best guys .. trimble are doing good things here in NZ so looking forward to the future .. I still have a well worn pair of "it doesn't stink" socks from 2007ish!
Want the billion left-over socks! Than I never have to worry about socks every again!
Send'em this way!
Well, since you won't be needing those socks anymore, I can take some to offset the ravenous Sock Monster in my dryer! ;)
Any chance you can send me a few pairs of those socks ? Got any Google Underwear too ?
Now that it seems that hand-made Geo-Modeling is coming to an end, I'm not going to have the means to earn enough to buy my own socks and underwear.
So if you have a few extra pairs to get rid of, I hope you'll think of me and send me a few !!??
We (Preacero Pellizzari C.A. - www.preacero.com) have SketchUP PRO License, we hope everything change for better, we are little nervous because we have importand projects now and we don't exactly know how can affect us. We use SketchUp Pro with Maxwell render, and we have BIM relations with our enginering technical room using SDS2 and Tekla for detailing to fabrication of steel structures. Our clients came to us with Autocad files. Consider all this for the new future. Best regards. Juan Rocha (Preacero Pellizzari's Architec).
All the best in the new (temporary) office! Looks almost homey with the tent and the toys and the Canadian bullhorn...
I think Trimble might do ya'll right :)
I'm sure, that new shiny hardware (especially a 15" Macbook Pro with a half-terabyte solid state drive and 22-inch rims) will cause epic SU update! And very soon as well ;)
Did you decide how to call new version? I mean, to call it just 'SketchUp 9' is a bit boring, right?
Amo SketchUp!! Não consigo conceber a possibilidade de trabalhar sem ter este programa como base de meus projetos. Nunca desenvolvo um projeto em sua parte técnica sem ter antes esboçado ideias para definir o que vai para as pranchas. Amo, amo, amo!!
All seems pretty positive at the moment...and you all seem to be smiling! ....long may it last :)
BEST OF LUCK GUYS!
Hi SketchUp team, Best wishes to all of you!
My work is since years heavily based on SketchUp. Therefore I hope for the "Trimble" best and I look forward to some great and useful upgrades, once you have settled into your new family.
Best of luck and regards from London, England
Rein
Good luck and good job.
Hey Aidan,
I'm thrilled you guys are going well and are having a smooth transition. These pictures are fantastic, please share more soon.
Talk to you all soon. Please send my regards to the team.
Best,
Andrew Nathanson
And why haven't we seen a SketchUp model of the future office? You can have the scale figure Susan standing in for the real Susan?
Trimble, if you mess up Sketchup, we will come after you with torches and... Um... Ahem, we will not be happy.
I was promised a gift from Google as a way of saying thank you for all the 3-D modelling I have done. I will be majorly dissapointed if I don't get a pair of socks.
John certainly looks well prepared for “roughing it in style” and quite distinguished too!
If you all are looking for something to do with those socks with the wrong logo, I'll take them! You can contact me at gplus.to/cpritchard :)
Days ago i was worry about the sale of SketchUp to Trimble, today i feel very, very happy because that. The company where i work use Tekla in the technical engineering room and Strumis to fabrication of steel structures, this companies are property of Trimble too. I'm architect, i'm expert using SketchUp, now i'm with my team work like BIM participant. WHAT A GOOD LUCK I HAVE IT, ALMOST LIKE A LOTTERY WINNER!!!!. I was worry before, because, i was thinking that SketchUp may be never will work like a BIM software with Tekla and Strumis.
Want the socks! Want the socks!
OK, if you won't give the socks to me, then send them to the people at Hope Village in Las Cruces, NM (http://hopevillagelascruces.wordpress.com)
OOh! Can I have some socks to use as prizes for my university's Project Lead the Way effort? We're hosting teacher training next week, and some Google socks would be just the thing.
(http://pltw.nmsu.edu)
Can i have socks? they are the best imaginable friends ever...
You should have sent us the socks, for being "the best 3D Geo-modelers in the world" or whatever.
Be careful of what you dream of. I've been Sketchup'd since '95 and dream using push/pull and can't see a photo without trying to rotate it. All my residential architectural working drawings are done with Sketchup Layout. Better things for architects will come from the new home at Trimble.
I think something awesome in the future is the option to print a 3D model (requiring the printer, etc.), because the modeling systems I've seen are so - so, but this is the perfect tool. Just throwing that in the air for the team.
Thank you for making SketchUp, and good luck.
Have you filled all those empty spaces already? It must be tiring moving into a new office, but most of the time, it is fun. It’s like reorganizing and redecorating to rebuild and create new inspiration to work. And btw, my nephew loves NERF guns! You’re going to have tons of fun with those!
Clayton Steadham
Nice office you guys! The storage of Nerf guns is vital in my opinion – every office should have those to protect themselves against the greatest evil, Boredom. No but seriously, Sketchup is one of the best tools I’ve used in a long time. I cannot imagine anything that simple (from a user’s point of view) to be so powerful a tool. I like how the users of Sketchup have been storing amazing designs in the 3D warehouse which makes life so much easier for the rest of us who are just untalented in designing.
Nice office you guys! The storage of Nerf guns is vital in my opinion – every office should have those to protect themselves against the greatest evil, Boredom. No but seriously, Sketchup is one of the best tools I’ve used in a long time. I cannot imagine anything that simple (from a user’s point of view) to be so powerful a tool. I like how the users of Sketchup have been storing amazing designs in the 3D warehouse which makes life so much easier for the rest of us who are just untalented in designing.
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