I admit that I had to look it up in spite of studying business
administration for two years: The English term for "Genossenschaft" is
"cooperation".
According to a couple of articles I found it seems to be an increasingly
popular and successful
type of organization, even more so since the financial crisis. According
to some statistics it also has the lowest chance of bankruptcy compared to
any other form of organisation (at least in Germany, according to this
short article:
http://www.finanzen.net/nachricht/private-finanzen/Marktwirtschaft-Erfolgsmodell-Genossenschaften-1638921).
This is exactly what I am thinking for years now: 3D software out of the
hands of large corporations.
All the legal problems that come with public companies (not being able
to talk freely about future developments at any time for example, safe
harbor blah) is just to much of a problem for a product that highly
depends on the input of it's users and proper communication, let alone
looming bankruptcy in financially difficult times, let alone in times of
bad management decisions, and combinations thereof. Blender can never go
bankrupt! That DATEV example is particularly nice since buyers of the
software automatically become owners of the company, not just the
product or license.
Some thoughts:
It would be cool if subscribes could actively contribute to the
development through feature requests and/or code contributions, and
everybody gets access to daily builds. Through regular code
contributions members could get "developer" status, freeing them from
having to pay a member fee.
It could be legally challenging to get that business model established
on an international level though, not sure how the "Genossenschaft"
translates to the US and other countries. Any ideas how this could work?
after laying around the whole night and couldn't sleep here are my 2
cents on the whole situation.
When you look at the history of Softimage it's quite obvious that
developing a software for this industry is quite a challenge. I think
there is reason why Daniel Langlois sold Softimage to Microsoft,
because he couldn't stand the developing costs for a complete rewrite
anymore. And when you see how long it took until XSI and later Moondust
got on the market you may have glimpse what it means to develop a piece
Software with this kind of sophistication.
I can only hope that FabricEngine and all the others develop a better
business model then the traditional one with investors outside of the
industry who are not bound to the company they are invested in and can
sell their investment at anytime to anywhom. I think the only solution
are strong bounds into the 3D industry itself.
I want to show you an example. In the Germany there is a company called
DATEV. They do a very unsexy thing: tax accounting software. But the
interesting part is that this company has been built by its customers
and is owned by its customers in form of a cooperative society. The
company exists since 1966 which gives you an idea about the stability
and longevity of such the business model.
More info about you find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datev
As manufacturing 3D software is obviously not a highly profitable
business (or why else Softimage got sold from the founder via Microsoft
throught AVID to Autodesk, Maya from Wavefront through Alias to
Autodesk, 3dsmax from Kinetix through discreet* to Autodesk)
I can only strongly recommend to stay away from financal investors and
the stock market and try to finance the development through the 3D
industry itself.
By the way if you look at Autodesk's latest business figures then you
get the impression that big troubles can arise. Last years revenue
dropped significantly especially when you compare it to the performance
of the competition in the engineering sector. Engineering is 93% of
their business by the way. M&E only contributes 7% to their revenue and
is decreasing.
Related to that I don't think that cloud based services which is
supposedly the next big thing is wanted by such a conservative industry
like the engineering industry is. And believe me or not they are
conservative. I have some clients in this field. When this cloud based
thing goes down the drain it is likely that Autodesk gets in big
trouble and will therefore concentrate on its core business and will as
consequence sell its stepchild M&E to whomever may have an interest in
it (hopefully not a financial investor).
Well I have no glass ball in front of me but I think the 3D industry
should be prepared for such a situation since Autodesk has a dominant
market position and apparently no one seems to care.
It's a shame their will be no other software with a
middle-click-this-button-to-repeat-the-last-command functionality
anymore because Autodesk owns the patent on this and many other
innovative concepts which made Softimage unique and stand out. So I
think I will stay with "my second love" until I go the "Kim Aldis
route".
Just my 2 cents. Sorry for the rambling speech.
I am still very thankful that I got in touch with Softimage at Spans
und Partner 8 years ago after messing around with 3dsmax and Maya.
Thanks to the developers and the community for supporting such a great
product over the last 28 years.
Cheers,
Stephan.
+1
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 5, 2014, at 5:11, Jeffrey Dates <[email protected]> wrote:
This.
Everything Andy said.
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Andy Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
Many studios having the same problems at the same time is a HUGE
opportunity if we leverage it properly.
I completely agree about the collaboration that will be necessary from
users. However, for studios' part, I know a lot of places are
interested in Fabric already, even if they haven't actually bought
licenses yet. So if part of the incentive was some kind of agreement
for the FE guys to help nurture a scene assembly tool to life quickly,
it might help tip the scale for whatever cost/benefit analysis places
are doing. The devs working on Fabric are truly some of the best in
the world (and from what I understand, a big part of the reason AD
bought Softimage to begin with). They are a big part of the equation
for what will happen in the future, even if they don't end up wanting
to build a scene assembler as a supported "product" in itself (or who
knows -- maybe they will?).
It would be great to get a little (or big?) list of studios that are
interested in this sort of project (or other ones) and possibly have
some kind of summit with the FE guys about what it would take to
fast-track FE into certain critical areas of production, assuming a
certain number of licenses were purchased. No commitments at this
point -- just a list of interested parties who might be curious enough
to be part of the conversation, pending whatever other conversations
need to be had with superiors. I.e., it's understood that nobody is
speaking for their companies at this point. Just indicating that they
think their company *might* be interested.
I'll start:
Psyop
Massmarket
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Felix Geremus
<[email protected]> wrote:
You are probably right. But these times are a little bit different and
maybe that's exactly the one chance inside all this mess. We're all
sitting in the same boat at the same time. I know a lot of studios who
entirely rely on Softimage for lighting. All of these will have to
spend time and thus money to move on to another pipeline during the
next two years anyway. So why not invest at least parts of this time
into the same thing? Individuals are great, and the community should
absolutely try. But it's so hard to put something like this together in
your spare time. A few studios supporting and profiting from this
effort would accelerate the whole process immensely. And about showing
potential: wasn't Stage, and all the other fabric applications build
for exactly this reason? To show the potential of such a project?
2014-03-04 21:55 GMT+01:00 Steven Caron <[email protected]>:
it is a bit harder for visual effects vendors/studios, in an already
difficult market, spending money on software development (not their
core business) is a hard sell. seeing a product or product in
development on the other hand drums up interest which leads to real
investment and collaboration. they need to see if their ideas are
aligned with others on the project. don't take my comment as
discouragement, it is just how i see it... for now it will be on
individuals to come together on a project which shows potential. i hope
we, the remaining softimage community, can do that together. again, not
discouragement to any studio which wants to partner to make something
happen...
steven
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Felix Geremus
<[email protected]> wrote:
So now that Softimage will be gone, isn't there room or even need for
collaboration here? Before everybody tries to build something
themselves, shouldn't people try to bundle forces? And I'm not only
talking about individuals here. I'm talking about small to medium size
companies who couldn't afford to build something like this alone.
--
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Stefan Kubicek
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keyvis digital imagery
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Phone: +43/699/12614231
www.keyvis.at [email protected]
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