CW wrote:
I doubt seriously that the developers of Sketchup had any ideas of
trying to compete with Autocad. There is no comparison. Sketchup, as it's
name suggests, is meant for quick concept and presentation drawings. It has
no facility to do the detail drafting needed for construction plans.

It is capable of doing detail drafting. I'm not designing space
shuttles, but I use Sketchup for residential design drawings. The
dimensioning and annotation capabilities are not as refined as some
other programs, but the tradeoff is often worth it. With more complex
drawings I export the Sketchup design and refine it in another program.
Sketchup already has a plugin that lets the SU design be ported into
Architectural Desktop (ADT).

ADT is a powerful tool, but it's ridiculously complex for the vast
majority of users. My ADT installation, which I have refined over a
number of years, has something like 100 buttons visible, and that's not
including flyouts. SU uses far fewer buttons with far greater effect.

Autodesk is ****ing off a lot of users by constantly updating the
program, and many times to little real benefit. Hang out sometime in
the alt.architecure newsgroup and see if you can find any fans of ACAD
or ADT. They use it, because they've been using it, and because it's
pretty much industry standard. When a competitor pops up with an
easier to use interface, with nearly all of the functionality, and
virutally unlimited money behind the development, it's doubtful that
any
designer/programmer/internet-search-behemoth-with-world-domination-intentions
would stop at that point and say - okay, that's enough.

R