The gut feeling I get from this thread is, AD views Softimage as a product that cannot stand on its own outside of perhaps Japan.
I have no idea why it's a better idea to spend marketing money trying to up-sell Max and Maya users on Suites than it is to take that marketing budget and try to build a larger customer base: whether they buy Max, Maya, Softimage or one of the Suites. Wouldn't it be a much wiser use of marketing dollars to highlight the value in each of the 3 and cast a wide net? The only conclusion I can come to is, other than Mark Schoennagel, there really is no evangelist for Softimage left. When the majority of people making the decisions apparently don't see the value in Softimage, why would anyone expect it to receive more than what it's gotten so far? ICE, Face Robot, the animation mixer, the FX Tree, and so on. You'd think this is the perfect mix to market to small studios, freelancers, etc. And, I'm fairly certain a lot more licenses can be sold to those markets than you'll sell to Dreamworks. I realize it's a lot more sexy to show Shrek on a demo at SIGGRAPH than a commercial for vacuum cleaners, but seriously I am pretty sure commercial work makes up a much larger volume of animation compared to feature work overall. I seriously hope the new dev team isn't disheartened by all this talk. I continue to have high hopes that in spite of AD's continued attempts to treat Softimage as the red-headed step-child of the family, it will live on and thrive. -PG
