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The problem here is what you euphemistically frame as "pricing power". It's a cornered market with every appearance of artificially high prices.

Monopoly rent extraction targeting a captive audience

Business customers don't pay for "having more buttons than mere consumers". Their business depending on such a crucial tool makes them reliant on swift and extensive support, negligible down times and so on. They are being cornered by ecosystem lock-in and workflow dependencies.

You could sell the same software at low prices to both "classes" of customers and charge extra for the services relevant for businesses. But then the fiction of "professional" whatever would be gone on the business side. And more importantly, companies like SketchUp would have to admit, they are merely SaaS with bad scaling prospects.

”companies like SketchUp…”

I think you mean ”companies like Trimble and Autodesk”.

”You could sell the same software at low prices to both "classes" of customers”

Slightly disagree. How do you brand the product then? ”Design your next hobby woodworking project” and ”Design next award winning apartment complex” are promises that speak to totally different markets.

So I would argue it would not make sense if you care about the brand.

Thats why these open source alternatives are so great - they are actually targeting a market no-one is interested to serve commercially and can have hobbyist specific brand without having to voice cringy boasts about being a perfect clone of something for the users of the said clone.

Expansion of software patterns to adjacent underserved markets via open source is really nice.

You engage in whataboutism.

The point here is, the actually largest share of consumers doesn't get served by the "market".

It's a systemic failure and people fail to grasp the exemplary nature of it.

No, I’m discussing CAD market as I see it. Based on my reading of the market with over a decade working in it at my previous job.

I think we see it differently but that’s fine, that’s why we have a discussion board :)

”the actually largest share of consumers doesn't get served by the "market"”

This is not my reading at all.

If we look at the business history of 3D modelers in the last ~30 years my reading is that consumer market hasn’t been able to _support_ many viable offerings in this space.

If you feel consumer market is underserved I would say it’s because it probably isn’t able to support a large business. There are not that many consumers who for example do woodworking or build a deck compared to who collect Lego:s.

Most CAD/ 3D modeling offerings trying to serve consumer and be affordable have died.

Tinkercad was probably most succesfull entry 14 years ago but even that failed to be a viable business.

It’s not rocket science to make a CAD package. It’s just _lots_ of hard work.

The thing is one or two people can easily create and maintain a CAD package. But that does not solve the distribution, product, and business issues in this space.

There is now a thriving market of free and affordable 3D design tools, and I think it will grow. (Eg. Blender, Nomad, Plasticity, Wings3D, MagicaCSG, MagicaVoxel, Womp..)

Maybe this will create more demand for consumer 3D design apps.

The problem with this strategy is that anyone who used it during its consumer period find the second pivot as inexcusable. I would not trust a company to steward software upon which my business relies after they move to drop their products’ existing customer base in search of greener pastures.

I would rephraze this that if you are not a product's intended target market chances of having nice product experience are suspect, and yes, it's a very reasonable choice to find some other product.

" in search of "

Trimble didn't need to search anything. They knew very well what the market is.

They could have a handled the consumer market retreat better.

> The problem with this strategy is that anyone who used it during its consumer period find the second pivot as inexcusable.

Unfortunately, that's not a problem with the strategy. That was taken into account by the business when the pivot was made, and it was determined to be an insignificant amount of users. The strategy worked without any problems, given the increase in sales. Anyone who used it during the consumer period is no longer the intended customer.

>SketchUp was originally an offering for the AEC market.

I used it a lot since the first demo version came out on CDs of computer magazines of the era, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

The first release was definitely not feasible for professional use in the AEC market. It was just a easy to use 3D modelling tool for hobbyists and tinkerers who wanted to CAD or model something simple at home with the mouse, without the cost and steep learning curve of parametric pro tools like AutoCAD, 3DSMax or Maya.

It was the first 3D modelling tool I used that made 3d modelling simple and fun that a child could enjoy. But definitely not AEC levels, at least not the first release.

>Then Google bought it and essentially pivoted it to consumer offering.

When Google bought it, it was already popular in the consumer market. They bought it because they needed a simple tool that anyone could use to populate Google maps with 3D buildings of their neighbourhood via crowdsourcing, and nothing was simpler back then then sketchup.

>They retargeted the offering to professional engineering and architecture firms.

More correct would be they pivoted there because that's only userbase that will pay for SW. Unless you have the backing of someone like Google or Autodesk being you to finance such a loss-leader, then you're forced to move away from free SW for casual home users to paying pro-sumers to survive as a company.

”More correct would be they pivoted there because that's only userbase that will pay for SW”

Negative. This was part of Trimbles strategy in AEC software purchases. They bought Tekla for Tekla Structures on 2011 for example.

Ofc they want to make money but it’s not like they _first_ bought SketchUp randomly and then tried to find someone to pay for it.

Architects would use it originally and to a small extent professional engineers because they wanted to communicate in 3d and tools at the time were so bad. It just couldnt do the drawings.

The big problem for architects is it never got to be able to do architectural drawings while other software came in with easier 3d modelling and visualisation (revit which autodesk bought and built out fully for industry use, rhino etc. Even blender).

Google did very little with it and Trimble too. Google i can understand ignoring it after Google earth stopped being a focus. Trimble I dont really understand what they want it for

Also it was notable for being a major commercial success for the ruby programming language, outside ruby on rails.

”Trimble I dont really understand what they want it for”

Architecture and engineering.

It’s used in design workflows from apartmentns to nuclear power plants.

Sure, it’s not evolved much. But I guess that stability is a value for some users.