I think Softimage lost there advantage and market share when they took
too long to write XSI (Sumatra) remember DS studios?
Is I recall correctly it took them almost 1 1/2 -2 years to come out
with XSI/Sumatra, even Sheridan College up in Canada couldn't wait any
longer
and switch to Maya. It has never able to regain the market share since
then. We stuck it through. Those were the days, when you have to pay 2-3
thousands dollars for a tif converter.
On 9/12/2012 5:51 PM, Matt Lind wrote:
????
Your history is skewed, Daniel.
Maya made it's debut in 1998 and was sold in modules at $7-10K USD
apiece depending on the module. The whole package cost $35K USD.
Softimage|XSI made it's debut in 2000 at just under $12K USD for the
advanced license, and just under $6K USD for the essentials license.
In 2002 Softimage was noticeably cutting into Maya's userbase with
it's lower price and rapid development, but they got cocky and with
XSI v3.0 raised their prices to $8K and $14K for essentials and
advanced respectively. About two months later Alias|Wavefront wised
up and dropped their price to near $7K USD for the complete package to
undercut Softimage. Softimage didn't budge thinking they were the
shizzle. That was the beginning of the end as I saw it. I was
running an authorized Softimage training center in Chicago at the
time. Prior to the price reductions I was getting an average of 15-20
calls per month for Softimage training with the numbers slowly
increasing month over month. After the Maya price drop (April 2002),
in less than 6 weeks Softimage training inquiries dropped to 2
inquiries per month and never recovered. I tried to tough it out
another couple of years under the hope Softimage would learn it's
lesson and regroup, but they never did and I had to close the business.
Matt
*From:*[email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Daniel H
*Sent:* Wednesday, September 12, 2012 7:20 AM
*To:* [email protected]
*Subject:* Re: In case you missed it..
Maya people are a dime a dozen and they typically get employed in a
starting $30K to $35K USD range. Because there are so many Maya users
running around, studios can employ a lot more of them for a dirt-cheap
salary. Maya is only more prevalent in studios because it started out
much cheaper than Softimage ($10K vs. $100K). Softimage is 24 years
old and Maya is only 14 years old. All this time Maya has only been
trying to play catch-up to SI.
Autodesk could easily market SI, sell more seats, and uplift consumer
confidence... but it doesn't want to. Autodesk is "suppressing"
Softimage on purpose because it wants to, and because it can. Autodesk
wants to market 3ds Max for architectural and Maya for entertainment.
Softimage is just some side money that has an unknown future.
All-in-all, jumping to Houdini is starting to look appealing.
Daniel
VFXM
