Hi Julian, I feel like the open letter written by Perry captures the best sentiments of the threads I have read the last few weeks. Carl will respond as he is very pragmatic and down to earth and was a software developer writing tools for many years. Sending the letter to Chris and Carl is the right place to put the effort and I thought the letter was balanced, passionate and fair. We looked at how Shake, FCP, and Avid DS went down and wanted to provide a two year transition window with support, a roadmap for the transition under NDA with key features and workflows being brought over, and a training plan that could be agile enough to work with the community to tailor it over time and do hands on work in central soft hotspots like Tokyo, London and Montreal.
I think this article captures for many what has been a brutal three years in the vfx business as we have seen so many good companies (Modus FX being the latest) get taken under by the broken business model of the film industry: http://www.thewrap.com/dear-hollywood-fix-vfx-will-fix-movie-business/ I think there are great ideas here on how to make the transition better and I will let Carl and Chris comment on whether they want to change that plan. cv/ ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 5:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Mayaor Max or any Suite. excellent stuff Julian. -----Original Message----- From: Julian Johnson Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 9:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Idea- Just keep Mental Ray and FBX support - Softimage free w/Mayaor Max or any Suite. On 15/03/2014 17:44, Graham Bell wrote: > I¹ve absolutely no doubt, but in all the time I¹ve demoed Softimage, even > pre-AD, there was never anyone who didn¹t like the software, tech or > couldn¹t see the potential benefits. However despite this, it wasn¹t easy > for people to simply adopt. > We could easily lead the horse to water, but never make it drink. Graham, as everyone at Autodesk seems convinced there is no market for Softimage what harm could there be in selling it? If the might of Autodesk's marketing resources had no impact then it stands to reason that no one else is going to be able to make a success of it. I mean you've tried your best, right? It's just not possible to market Softimage. Avid tried and failed, you tried and failed. It stands absolutely no chance of ever becoming a competitor to Maya or Max as it's too hard to adopt. Why not, therefore, sell it on to an interested third party who could solely cater for the niche Softimage audience? Don't we all win that way? We have an interested 'owner' - you can focus your resources on Maya and Max and walk away with a lump sum for 'innovative' R&D and you still have no competition. You no longer have an alienated and hostile Softimage customer base. Better still, as soon as Maya becomes a more attractive option we then have the choice to adopt or not. Given the myriad improvements listed by Chris that adoption in a few years time should be a no-brainer for us, shouldn't it? We can once more re-enter the Autodesk fold willingly and migrate to the better product. If you, Chris and Maurice genuinely believe in 'new' Maya and Autodesk's own marketing abilities it should be relatively easy to sell it to Softimage customers in a few years time. I'm sure we're going to be blown away by the new innovations that Maurice talked about. With the current roadmap and user input Maya will undoubtedly be a better product than Softimage is now. I know you wouldn't be asking us to transition to an inferior product - that just wouldn't make business sense. No billion dollar business would treat their customers that way. Fundamentally, it seems as though if the initial decision to buy XSI was motivated by a desire to move the product forward and market it in earnest (with a genuine business case that demonstrated either more sales or additional revenue - and why else would you have bought XSI?) then there has been a colossal failure in that business plan by Autodesk. The burden of that failure has been placed solely on the customers to whom, surely, Autodesk has some level of responsibility. And yet, that burden of responsibility doesn't seem to have been reflected in the manner in which Softimage is currently being EOL'd. I can't think of a more brutal scenario - immediate cessation of development; no prior warning; no safe-harbour alternative option; no pre-planning or understanding of the essential migratable features in Softimage; no in-place transition training; no concept of recompense for your failure; and no willingness to negotiate or ameliorate the terms of the EOL in any substantial way. Julian
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