Hi, Frederick and everyone else,
I'm responding to Frederick's message directly, but I'd like to be clear about the fact that in no way should anyone perceive the following message as pointing fingers at him. I'm using his quotations as a convenience to answer the questions he asks which I think are on most people's minds. But please keep in mind that everything I say here is directed toward the community in general and please no one take offense if something rubs you the wrong way.
Frederik wrote:
I'd challenge you and claim it's because they know zip about 16bit, 32bit and 64bit software...
You're talking about the average Joe who's using SketchUp similar to how they're using MS Word or Excel...
I agree 100%. "Simple" Pro users of that type would consider SketchUp to be every bit as integral to their work as Word or Excel, and yet they may not come anywhere near using the vast array of capabilities of any of those programs the way power users would. But as such, those folks aren't pressed by problems with 64-bit, at least not in the way power users may be. And yet, those folks buy SketchUp in huge numbers, and have just as many other complaints, problems, and feature requests for it as the outspoken power users on this forum. We take very seriously our duty to pay attention to these users' needs just like we do our power users.
Frederik wrote:
I know huge architectural companies who are using SU professionally on a daily basis, but where no-one are part of either the official SU community nor do they know about the existence of this board...
Exactly my point. Those people have myriad other ways of getting in touch with us beyond the forums--particularly the enterprise customers, who work with dedicated support and sales personnel. So just because they're not part of this community doesn't mean we don't have ways of gauging their interest and finding out what they need.
As an example, would you believe that the most important thing enterprise organizations want is for us to completely rewrite the licensing engine and provide better in-product identity management? We've spent a ton of time examining how we might improve licensing, and I'll bet almost no one in this forum would care. While it isn't something the average Pro customer with a small firm would care about, by sheer numbers of affected Pro users, it dwarfs the 64-bit proponents by many orders of magnitude.
And as for those categories of users who aren't getting in touch with us in any way? Well, an awful lot of complicated mathematics and heuristics go into classifying our user sets and extrapolating what features are (or will be) needed by those groups, even if they can't speak up directly. Yes, this is something we very much pay attention to!
Frederik wrote:
I'd say that less than 2% of the multiple millions of active SU users in the world cares about joining such communities...[i](As an example, I'm quite certain that there's a huge customer base in the Far East, who would never join this board...)
This is absolutely true. Mainland Chinese is the second-most-popular language of SketchUp besides English. And as such, we've dedicated tremendous resources to the Chinese market. The Sophie character who loads with SketchUp 2014 is a member of the SketchUp team, a native Chinese woman who leads our business development, support and outreach endeavors in China. By virtue of both the program running in another language and the people there using it for different things and under different regulations than elsewhere, Sophie has her finger on the pulse of an incredible number of issues that aren't even on the radar for our English users.
Frederik wrote:
The SCF community has grown to more than 250.000 users... As a software developing company, you should embrace every input you can get from here... Positive as well as negative...
Believe it or not, trust me or not, WE DO LISTEN! We love SketchUp and want to put out the very best product we can. We are also very keenly aware that without the income we earn from selling Pro, there wouldn't be a product at all, so of course we're interested in hearing every suggestion we might use to make the product better--to get new customers and keep existing customers as happy as possible.
If we didn't care to hear about the problems and criticisms, none of us would be here. Most of us don't have the time to ever post in response, but user suggestions and conversations such as those in this thread are read, passed along, and distilled by our team all the time! We don't ignore any of this stuff. All of it goes into the bug tracking and feature request systems. Maybe we've not reiterated this fact enough, but maybe we just took for granted that you all would know that since the people on our team are all the type who really do listen carefully when we say we will.
I'm not sure this community on the whole understands well enough that just because we don't implement every single suggestion we read here doesn't mean that we're not listening. Some of those suggestions are things that are in the works, or which are on our radars to do "someday". Others are those which we have considered, but ultimately dismissed. While we may not explain every decision and folks might not agree with our reasoning even if we did, our eventual dismissal of certain ideas doesn't mean we're completely oblivious or unconcerned about what our users have to say.
To reiterate what I said at top, I'm not directing everything right at Frederick, but at the whole community--especially in this case. Something I think a lot of people need to be reminded is, "you are not our only customer." While we work diligently to make everyone as happy as possible, the simple fact is that we have too much going on to pursue every single thing requested of us, and many times, keeping one set of users happy means consciously making choices that dissatisfy another group. We do the best we can.
Also, I know it's easy to forget or not to notice, but if you take a look back over the years and years of SketchUp development, there are plenty of examples of huge things we have done in response to user feedback.
Frederik wrote:
Solo have a great point with his statement:
Solo wrote:...especially folks that use 3rd party integrated software...
Jeff also has a great and very legitimate point:
Jeff Hammond wrote:
won't it have to go 64bit eventually?
We're very much aware of those folks who are using third-party software or running into problems with the 32-bit setup for whatever reason. We're also in agreement that SketchUp will have to go 64-bit someday. We've never said otherwise. It's just that, for myriad reasons, we haven't done it yet.
Frederik wrote:
I'm not saying that if you take the 64bit route, all issues will get cured, but I really don't understand why you cling to 32bit, when everyone else go the 64bit route...
By now, I've answered this in other messages that have come since. I'm just reiterating that I have indeed directly answered this question. Even so, I'll say it again, this time in a more succinct presentation.
Yes, we know SketchUp must go 64-bit someday, and in fact, all of us on the SketchUp team very much WANT it to. However, nothing is ever as simple as just wanting; if it were easy or free, we would have done it already. The technical endeavor of migration to 64-bit will be very difficult, expensive and time-consuming, requiring tremendous investment of skill and care to ensure the quality and performance of SketchUp do not suffer. Although there are some serious limitations of the current 32-bit system for some users, we believe the community greatly mischaracterizes the issue and sees a 64-bit binary as a silver bullet that it simply is not. The reason a 64-bit version has not yet been released is a business decision that stems from careful consideration of the the costs of the endeavor and the true benefits to be had, in light of our other priorities. Those other priorities come from several sources, including not just customer suggestions and wish lists, but those tasks which are found to be of critical importance to growing our customer base and the promotion of Trimble's strategic vision for our product and the company.
Andrew
Statistics: Posted by AndrewS — Sat Apr 26, 2014 3:09 am