Hi guys,
Your math is a little off as the number is 600 m in R&D and 1 billion in sales and administrative. The administrative covers everything from all the people that support the developers to the building and computers. Autodesk spends more on R&D than Adobe or Apple. Our CEO Carl Bass uses the products and tells about what he doesn't like all the time. Again you can check him making stuff here: http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/maker-king . We have a huge research group that drives its own agenda (http://www.autodeskresearch.com/) and our doing lots of labs/research projects here ( labs.autodesk.com) . Our research into multi-touch, reality capture and 3D printing is industry leading and we have been involved in projects like molecular maya working with MIT on cancer research (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/10/features/biology-is-the-new-software ). Autodesk's executives (check their bio) including Marc Stevens who ran softimage and runs the film/tv group are all engineers and this is a technology driven company. I know it sucks that no one from Autodesk in M&E has said this to this community but I like working for Autodesk and believe that this is a good company. For Maya 2015 we will show off the redesigned from the ground up fluid flip method from Dr. Robert Bridson , a new voxel based skinning method that was a siggraph paper , continued improvements on the hair and cloth simulation of Nucleus from Dr. Jos Stam. Most of the innovation in this industry comes from the top studios and the work that comes out of production. The snow in Frozen was amazing but a lot of work. (http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications) If<http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/publications)%20If> you take the innovation that has really driven the industry forward in the last five years the origins are all on production. With tech like Alembic, openvdb, Ptex, UV-tiling, opensubdiv, open color IO, Open EXR, etc.... there are smart people in studios like Sebastian Sylwain (ex-weta), Bill Polson (Pixar), Lincoln Wallen (DreamWorks), Rob Bredow (Sony), Dan Candela (Walt Disney animation), and Hilmar Koch (ILM) that make great code and open source to the benefit of the community. Then there are tons of contributors like Autodesk and the Foundry who do things like porting, standards and bug fixing so this all works together. Even the applications that are young and fast moving like Mari (weta) and Arnold (Sony) are from production and still take their main direction from production just like Maya. All of the applications from Soft with Jurassic to Maya with Dinosaurs got their footing with production work. The fact that Toy Story was all built on in house hardware and 20 years later you have amazing movies like Despicable Me and Lego movie made with mostly off the shelf tools is amazing. Go back and look at the tools you think are innovating and see how many of their "innovations" are based off Siggraph papers or are inspired by tools written in production. I for one have no problem giving credit where credit is due and most anything in Maya that is good has come from being built in partnership with customers. This industry is lucky to have organizations like Siggraph and FMX that foster and promote innovation and we love that more and more of the base platform is community based. We have led the VES effort to standard Linux libraries for all the vendors (Foundry, SideFX, Autodesk) and get to work in organizations like open GL building out the next gen drivers and MPAA (setting the new ACES standard for replacing Cineon) all building up the base upon which the industry sits. We get to package up technology like Xgen and bring it to the larger market and all vendors get to put in Alembic to share data and open color I/O to set color within a facility. This movement has allowed medium sized companies to do shots that were once only possible by a few shops and more importantly this has allowed stories to be told in countries that have never before had a voice. There is no one tool to rule them all and Max vs Maya vs Soft vs Houdini vs Modo vs Zbrush vs fabric does not foster innovation. Raf said it well when he described the Lego as all of those tools plus internal tools plus really smart people plus an amazing story made what we all enjoyed so much. First and foremost everyone who works at Autodesk in the M&E division including the people who used to work at Soft (there are way more than have left) love the film and games industry and the chance to be a part of it. The decision with Soft was a hard one but we back it so we can focus on helping the ecosystem make better movies and games. Innovation comes from the synergies of all these products, platforms, hardware and your talent and putting that on any one tool or company does not capture what is still a vibrant passionate community. The business model right now sucks and things need to change but there is still a bright future ahead and many problems left to solve. cv/ ________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of Toonafish [[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2014 7:39 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Maya or Max or any Suite. Sales revenue was 2.31 Billion in 2013, and gross income 2.07 Billion. The "funny" thing is that while I read on the list the reason for shutting SI down is that they believe they can focus more on innovation this way. But AD spent only 600 million of that money on R&D, and 2.83 Billion on "sales and administration". They spend way more money on selling the idea they are innovative, then they spend on actually trying to innovate. And when you consider how little innovation they have been able to squeeze out of a budget that is still humongous to smaller, much more innovative shops, it's simply embarrassing. http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/adsk/financials# You can sell customers, or sheep as they are called in some business models, heaps of crap as long as you spend enough dough on convincing them it really doesn't stink, it's the sweet smell of innovation. I suspect the peeps that pull the strings at AD really couldn't care less about clients or innovation as long as this attitude brings in higher profits. They wouldn't smell innovation even if it sat on their face. Softimage with ICE is one of the most innovative DCC packages they have on their hands, and even though they seem to understand that you need to spend at least some money to sell innovation, they couldn't be bothered to lift a single finger to sell SI. but I'm rambling on.. -Ronald On 3/15/2014 9:46, Matt Lind wrote: I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What you have to understand is Autodesk doesn't want customers running concurrent sessions off a single license as in a Maya/Max and a Softimage session running in parallel. that would effectively allow double the users to work while paying only half the price. eg; if a customer has 50 licenses it would allow 50 maya + 50 softimage users to run concurrently, but pay for only 50 licenses. Some studios are ethical and wouldn't do something like that, but as someone mentioned just the other day, other studios in lesser affluent places might not be so ethical. Even if Softimage were included for free, it still consumes some amount of resources to ensure it still installs and runs as advertised. I agree in principle Autodesk should continue Softimage until one of their other products can replace the functionality. If anything, that's the ball that was dropped in this whole debacle. Of all companies on the planet, you'd think the one with all the accumulated experience of all the products that went through this process in the 1990's would know better and be more prepared than anyone else. But what's done is done. The problem with the theory of disgruntled users leaving and hurting Autodesk is that the Softimage user base isn't large enough to really be missed on Autodesk's bottom line. think about it. Only 8% of Autodesk's revenue comes from media and entertainment. Of that 8%, about 5% of it is from Softimage (0.4% total) - and that might be a generous number. For every $100 Autodesk earns in revenue, 40 cents comes from Softimage. Take out expenses and you're looking at much less. I don't remember the actual number, but I thought somebody recently reported Autodesk earned $392 million last year. So, let's run that through the calculator: $392,000,000 USD * 0.004 = $1,568,000 Softimage gross revenue I don't know what 10 developers in Singapore get paid, so I'll use conservative values based on USA rates: 10 * $100,000 = $1,000,000 subtract expenses from revenue: $1,568,000 - $1,000,000 = $568,000 I don't know what marketing of Softimage costs, but I'm willing to bet $568,000 USD doesn't go very far for a product that needs a lot of attention to survive. Even if tripled, that's still lean. See the problem? One item of note that probably hasn't been brought up in discussion yet is that Softimage has been included in the Max and Maya suites the past few years, so some sales of Max and Maya may actually be Softimage sales in a certain light - I know of at least one studio where that is the case. In that scenario Softimage is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to accounting. I mourn the loss of Softimage as much as anybody having dedicated 21+ years of my life to it both as professional user and former owner of a Softimage certified training center. Sometimes life sucks. Matt -- Ronald van Vemden ----------------------------------------------- 3D Graphics & Animation Cyberfish Laboratories | www.cyberfish.nl<http://www.cyberfish.nl> Toonafish | www.toonafish.nl<http://www.toonafish.nl> tel. +31(0)20 5289291 fax +31(0)20 5289292 email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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