Moving onward, moving in

Monday morning, Sandra and I (the token married couple on the team) drove right past the Google office on our way to work. It's a new day for SketchUp, and for the SketchUp crew. With “the deal” officially closed, all 30+ of us have moved to a building that will be SketchUp Worldwide HQ—for about three months, at least. They're building us a brand new office right here in Boulder, Colorado; until it's ready, we're in temporary digs.

John (our fearless product manager) and Susan (the scale figure in every new SketchUp model) are neighbors here in Temporary Cubeland.

Laura (and her million-dollar smile) helps customers from the Sales Quad.

We sent an expedition out to buy nerd toys for the office. Mission accomplished.

Our QA (Quality Assurance) lab includes Brad, who looks surprisingly lifelike for a robot.

The engineering team has been working out.

Our new office has lots of empty space. Floor hockey, anyone?

My Junk Fort (accumulated over eight years, three companies and four offices) keeps Tyson at a safe distance. Tyler and Jody gossip in the background.

Simone demonstrates why he's the new QA manager by crawling under his desk to plug something into the adjacent wall.

The Tent Room makes dedicated outdoorsmen like Mark feel right at home.

We have a couple of billion pairs of socks with the wrong logo on them.

Our new friends at Trimble have bent over backwards to make us feel welcome. Punching in on Monday, we all found shiny new computers on our desks. Last week I was using a three-year-old laptop with a broken USB port, a twenty minute battery and a Yucatan-sized dent. Now I'm rocking a 15" Macbook Pro with a half-terabyte solid state drive and 22-inch rims. I'm ashamed to admit it, but my new hardware makes me feel taller.

Igor, Andrew and Tyler spent last week in California working on the transfer of SketchUp's intellectual property from Mountain View (Google) to Sunnyvale (Trimble). Even in this era of Wi-Fi and bluetooth and NFC and Dropbox and general cloud worship, the best way to make sure SketchUp's bits and bytes moved safely from seller to buyer was to load the whole shebang onto a couple of monster hard drives and chauffeur them down the freeway.

Igor (tennis sweater) and Andrew (fauxhawk) with two members of Google's IT staff outside of Trimble HQ with armfuls of SketchUp source code. Horse and buggy not visible in this frame.

One last thing: I know that lots of you are concerned about how things are going to go now that we’re part of Trimble. The outpouring of “Don’t hurt my SketchUp!” sentiment after we made the announcement in April was completely understandable—and completely understood. You’ll have to take our word for it, but so far, things are looking good. If the way our team has been treated provides any clues (and I think it does), SketchUp’s future is very bright, indeed. The folks at Trimble “get it” in a way that’s hard to explain.

At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, the Trimblers I’ve met are kind, generous, smart and above all, genuinely well-meaning. A few of them have even joined us at the new office for the summer; that didn’t happen in 2006 when Google bought us. In the next month or so, I’ll use this blog to re-introduce some of the SketchUp team, as well as the other Trimble folk who are working closely with us.

Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Evangelist