SketchUp (formerly Google SketchUp, now owned by Trimble) has been revamped since I first got it. So to share the SketchUp love, here are the tutorials and resources I found most helpful: I invested a weekend learning it and then spent the next few weeks painstakingly building my virtual house stick by stick, pretty much like I would do during actual construction (it takes less time if you aren’t making a zillion design decisions and research tangents along the way). Once you get a few key concepts, it starts to make a lot of sense. Just as I was getting serious about my final designs, I stumbled across some online SketchUp tutorials and the lightbulb went on. I was able to make some rudimentary conceptual designs but lines stuck together, moved in strange ways, and basically made me want to kick it. ![]() I’m usually comfortable diving into a new software application and figuring it out as I go, but I quickly learned that SketchUp, while an amazing free 3D modeling tool, is not exactly intuitive. Part of this was because I loved the tactile feeling of drawing and it seemed in keeping with the tiny house simplicity mindset, and part of it was that my earlier experience with SketchUp had been a little frustrating. You may remember I was determined to design my house the old school way with graph paper, pencil and a triangular engineering ruler. Now that I’ve survived the last few months of design crunch and the first building stint, I’m catching up on some technical posts. While no one wants to see their co-workers shipped out of the Googleplex, it may be wise for Google to sell the meat instead of just trimming the fat.Naj Haus in SketchUp (since revised slightly, including adding a full-length covered porch on the front) The inefficient bureaucracy, lost transition time, and expensive counter-offers it has to make to get talent to stay are running up costs for Google while slowing it down. I often hear that headcount bloat and disorganization in the ballooning Google disgruntles employees and makes them flee for startups. That’s because buying Instagram for a high price just to fracture focus by running it independently didn’t align with Page’s game plan. While initially vaguely interested in buying the photo sharing service, we hear Google walked away before talks went past the coffee table stage. This strategy of divesting successful but outlying products meshes with why we’ve heard Google didn’t buy Instagram. If the company had to do it again, maybe it’d sell them off instead. That would mean Google could have made up to $45 million in profit on the sale, though its likely closer to a few million.Įarly this year Google shut down its photo editor Picnik and open sourced its Android stargazing app Google Sky Map. As Trimble called the acquisition of the product “immaterial”, and therefore less than 5% of its annual revenue, it couldn’t have paid more that $90 million for it. ![]() Analysts speculated that Google paid $45 million for SketchUp in 2006. ![]() So rather than sink it in the deadpool, Google sold it to someone that can actually put it to use - Trimble, a mapping, surveying, and navigation equipment company. It doesn’t fit with last year’s theme of inherently social product that could be tied to Google+, or this year’s plan to simplify everyone’s lives. It’s a relatively niche product for architects and the construction industry, game developers, and filmmakers. But it just didn’t fit with the direction Google is heading in. It had 30 million activations since joining Google as part of Software in March 2006. If it’s now willing to sell them instead, Google could streamline around the theme of making user’s lives more convenient, while making some money at the same time. ![]() The company frequently shuts down extraneous products, but that requires redistribution of their team members internally. This could signal a sea change in how Larry Page executes his vision for a leaner, more focused Google. Google’s sale of a previously purchased arm of the company this morning, 3D modeling software SketchUp, to Trimble, is its first divestment in years, and according to sources the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006.
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