Hello Mr. Maurice, although many of the points you make about the suit strategies make sense, some things dont quite add up. I am not saying selling it to Max and Maya people is not a good strategie, dont get me wrong. It is ok if AD wants to do some extra bucks, and if SI can offer this guys something that is missing in other packages. As other people have stated, the main problem is the fact that Softimage has gotten badly mistreated in marketing outside of anything related to suits. You may argue that is not, but lets check the evidence:
Mayas latest custumer story September 2012 http://area.autodesk.com/products/view/maya Maxs latest custumer story September 2012 http://area.autodesk.com/products/view/3dsmax SIs latest customer story MARCH 2010!! Ill repeat MARCH 2010!!! http://area.autodesk.com/products/view/softimage Now, although there is surely a lot more customers, and therefore stories, on the Maya side, was there really nothing relevant happening in SIs planet the last couple years? COME ON! We see a bunch of commercials on Vimeo, know of some feature animation like the one Alok has talked about, the work from the guys at Triggerfish, the work done on A Monster in Paris, work done by AnimaLogic, etc... etc... Some of this could be even "sold" as suits, whatever, just guive credit where credit is due! Yeah there is a Facebook page where some of this stuff is published in a slacky way, but having stuff from 2010 in a product page certainly may influence the way some executives see something they are about to buy. It is hard to understand as to why this is happening, maybe you can enlighten us. Fact is for people that are NOT currently AD users Softimage is invisible. For them Softimage could actually (or not) look advantageous. They could find it usable for animation in general, for Face Robot ( https://vimeo.com/48329089), maybe because of particles or procedural goodies... People that use Modo, C4D, people that sculpt stuff in ZBrush and want to get into animation, but they will never hear about Softimage. Softimage is not being advertised as a companion, it is ONLY being avdertised as a companion, detracting value of the curriculum of people who have spent years learning it to do all kind of things in a 3d pipeline. Oh so you use Softimage, so I guess all you can do is move a bunch of little particles around (if that).
