By Randall S. NewtonYesterday, as a result of my almost live coverage of
3D Base Camp, the SketchUp Users Conference, I received two messages with the same interesting content: the rumor is out that Google wants to acquire @Last Software. One source was a manager at a large CAD vendor not based in Colorado; the second was the proverbial well-placed person. I won’t be more specific—good sources are worth their weight in gold to a journalist, but tend to dry up when revealed.
Neither source knows the other, but both claimed they had “really good information” that made them confident the rumor was valid. So, last night at the 3D Base Camp party (a great western barbeque at an outdoor venue called Planet Bluegrass), I sat down with @Last Software’s co-founder Brad Schell to chat about the conference, the alt-country band
Buckskin Stallion (providing the party’s music), life with kids (he wanted to understand how my wife and I “do it all” raising nine kids), and of course, that great Google rumor.
When I told him what I’d heard, he looked off into the distance, thought for a second, and then told me the rumor history of @Last Software. It seems like every few months, Schell said, @Last is just about to be gobbled up by one bigger company or another. For a long time it was Autodesk, then it was Bentley. Other past rumors have included Adobe and even (of course) Microsoft. If we had been interested in being acquired in the early days of our company, Schell said, it would have been a betrayal of the vision behind @Last, and a betrayal of the faith and loyalty SketchUp users have placed in the company.
Having worked closely with CAD users for almost 20 years, both inside and outside CAD companies, I know the sense of personal loyalty and trust many users experience. When Autodesk acquired Generic Software (my employer then) in 1989, the mail from users was more a reflection of mourning than outrage. I agree with Schell’s assessment, that an acquisition of the company in years past by any other CAD vendor would have resulted in keen disillusionment from SketchUp users. In reality, it wasn’t very likely. Only Autodesk and Bentley, among CAD vendors in the AEC space, have the resources to acquire @Last Software. Until recently, Autodesk had a competing product, Autodesk Architectural Studio. Bentley would not have seen the acquisition of @Last as a strategic move in service to their larger customers. (Actually, SketchUp is a disruptive product in the CAD marketplace, and a threat to other vendors, if you have followed the work of
Clayton Christensen. But that discussion is for an article I’ll write after I get home.)
We talked for a bit about Google, about their success in the market and their corporate vision, which goes beyond search. “
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” is how the Google corporate mission statement begins. SketchUp, I told Schell, is a marvelous tool that fits the “accessible and useful” part of the mission statement. He agreed completely. We also agreed that perhaps “this great Google rumor” as he called it, is going around because there is a new add-on tool for SketchUp that allows someone to add a SketchUp model to a Google Earth map. (More about that later today, after the Google Earth 101 session here at 3D Base Camp.)
Getting back to the subject of the Google rumor, he got a wry smile on his face and said, with his typical dry humor, “Randall, that’s a great rumor. You should really pump it!”
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