On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Sebastien Sterling < [email protected]> wrote:
> Nex, Bitfrost, moving the soft team onto maya, the new look of the node > editor, i'd say they are doing some pretty desperat "folding", however both > your options whether selective asimilation, or abandone mont have the same > outcome. softimage gets the shaft. > Not Softimage. Softimage *users* get the shaft. Every one of us. And let's be very clear. AD's track record of incorporating acquired technologies is execrable (in the M&E space -- maybe they're really nice guys over in the CAD/archvis division, I wouldn't know). Most products that are even released by AD after acquisition and at best a couple years of half-hearted "support" much less any development at all become unsupported abandonware flogged mercilessly as "value-added" bonus applications. Most of them don't even get an official AD release. AD can't even do more than half-assed implementations of 5-year-old open-source tech (EXR, Alembic), and certainly hasn't shown any real ability to innovate, other than ICE (and I'd be surprised if anyone at AD who wasn't part of Softimage originally had anything substantive to do with it). Back in the 80s, there was a T-shirt that read: "IBM -- weak as a kitten, dumb as a sack of hammers." Unfortunately, AD isn't weak, but more unfortunately, it's far dumber when it comes to the M&E space than any self-respecting sack of hammers. Yes, it's a hard business. So the thing to do would be to leave it to people who know what to do with it, not break the entire industry so badly that no one can fix it. I'm venting, obviously. Perhaps my fears will all be laid to rest by the release of an amazing new Soft-inflected version of "Maya" that will fix all the crippling workflow issues and also whiten my teeth. But I'm not holding my breath. There better be some pretty decent compensatory license deals, or I smell class-action. Who's going to do "Hitler reacts to Autodesk's killing of Softimage?" The only problem is the wealth of material that will need to be trimmed down.
