Keep up the noise people!! Change has already happened.... keep up the pressure folks. Write to your congressman..Ermm, I mean this guy...
[email protected] Please PLEASE... don't name call... but for god's sake let him know why this is a BIG MISTAKE for his company and yours! It's worse for them than it is for us, for them to kill soft..it simply makes no short or long term sense. They are doing nothing but alienating users, not just on the Softimage side---as I have not met a single Maya or Max user that actually likes the company called Autodesk. Let him know that there is a market for Soft..and the ONLY reason they are not making a killing on it is that they won't invest and market it...that's it...otherwise it would have been gaining and growing the user-base like mad. It also gives AD a safety net... Maya is busting at the seams... they are now having to make programs that run outside of Maya to do a tenth of what ICE does...Biofrost... Bio-hazard is more like it from the word on the street. If it falls apart, and AD falls on its face, as it has many times with attempted "rewrite" (Toxic any one?..remember that was supposed to turn into the 3d app too..lol, how quickly people forget ADs blunders. How many millions were wasted on that dev...vs what it costs to buy and maintain soft???). Soft is the only recently rewritten core...major overhaul was done for ice.. major) What Autodesk needs is a Walt Disney, a John Lassiter or dare I say a Willy Wonka? It needs a visionary leader that has been in the trenches of all aspects of 3d and compositing. Who understands the needs of the big and small shops alike... One who knows the future is not in a code base which is more than 24 years old. One that understands that if the customer is happy, the stock holders will be happy. The person should not be driven by board meetings, but rather exciting the entire 3d user base instead of alienating them. One who understands that what makes a great development team is great and transparent interaction with its beta testers.. One who is not afraid to let one product outshine the rest on its own merits...(like the Whiskey Tree elysium demo that was axed at siggraph last year since it outshone the Disney technology AD licensed.) One that understands there should be a production team at AD using their products to produce short films, so they have a freaking clue what the real world needs...this is how both softimage and alias used to do it...before they were bought by companies that simply don't understand how creativity works... One that the user aspires to be like......because that person "makes the cool stuff" AD you are making creative software...AD needs to foster a creative culture...period. IF AD thinks you have, I can assure you that you have not... your results speak for themselves. Don't kill Soft, prop it up and keep it viable...and MARKET IT! It can already do so much your other two 3d apps can't... Do the same with the rest... keep them alive..until AD delivers a new modern app that we will all be happy to move to.
