Hi Adam Could not have put the education points better. We are suffering the exact same thing.
Kind regards Angus ________________________________ From: Adam Sale [[email protected]] Sent: 20 March 2014 09:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: new Q&A with AD Great points Perry. I will add that all of this could have so much easier, less painful, and PRODUCTIVE. Had Soft been kept around while biFrost matured, it is highly likely that you would have gotten some great cross pollination between ICE and biFrost as the two packages were supported alongside one another in parallel. Artists would gave WILLINGLY started tinkering with their setups in biFrost, porting them from ICE, with the knowledge that Soft would still be supported while BF grew up. That is the way to grow a new idea based on the framework of an older, highly functional idea. By killing off any future for Soft and ICE, you have alienated a lot of very talented artists / TD's who could have jump-started a bunch of user created tools for BF with their ICE savvy. Now, you will find a lot of those individual scatter to the winds, and take their ideas to competing companies. Not the way to begin to build community around a fledgling next gen idea. If the intent was to keep customers around and help them build the future, this was not the way to go about it. I'm sure AD has come to realize this now. >From an educational front, this has been a horrible couple of weeks. Two years >to transition is not the same time frame in edu. The minute a lot of my >students heard the news that Soft was EOL, they pretty much decided that what >I have to say is not worth their time. The tune out has been epic. Now, they and our higher ups in admin are clamoring for me / us to change our courses to Maya right away. Not an easy task when you have years of prepped material, notes videos, models, animation clips, assets, etc. It's just not possible to shift gears so quickly. So, in the span of less than a few weeks, I have gone from knowing and sharing relevant knowledge and having attentive students, to feeling alienated, and irrelevant. Its a bit of a kick in the groin, something I am having to work through, like we all are. >From a small studio point of view, I can keep using Softimage, and all is fine >for the short term, my clients really don't care what I use, it's the edu >front which has been near and dear to my heart for 16 years now that is really >going to be a tough adjustment. Like many others on the list, my time to relearn 17 years worth of workflow just isn't what it was when I was an unattached childless individual. Time that I would rather spend with my family, or pursuing other interests, will now be devoted to getting up to speed as quickly as possible. That's the way things go, and I understand that, but doing so by actually going backwards in terms of productivity doesn't sit well with me. Hoping like hell biFrost actually delivers on its potential, and that the humanize project actually goes somewhere. You guys have a lot of mending of fences to do. This should have gone down so differently. Adam On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Perry Harovas <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Regarding the new article/interview with Maurice: Maurice, I do appreciate you answering some of our questions. One thing that really has us (Softimage users) angry about is that your company had plans in September of 2012 (and most likely earlier) to not invest further in Softimage and to keep it going on a maintenance level, to not significantly invest in Softimage. Your company must have known this would anger people, and while yes, we were told that the team was moving to Singapore, we were NEVER told that it was because the investment in Softimage was going to be diminished and it was going to basically be done to keep it on life support. Had we known that, we could have made the (to us, very logical) assumption that Softimage was going to be EOL'd at some point. I asked on the forums, I asked in beta programs if Softimage was not a real priority to Autodesk, and got no replies. This, among other things, really shows a very deep lack of respect for your Softimage customers, who were paying subscription or support fees to (ultimately) fund the development of Maya. How does that sound like a good thing to do to your customers? If we were told what Autodesk's real plans were for Softimage, we would have been to blame for not seeing the future (because it would have been laid out for us already). Being a public company does not mean you cannot give your customers an idea of your intentions. I am NOT referring to EOL for Softimage, because if we take yo at your word that it wasn't the plan for that product until end of 2013, then it wouldn't be on anyone's radar as a plan. What I am talking about is that Autodesk assumed that it could tell a half-truth (or essentially not tell the entire story) to keep customers placated with regards to the future of Softimage. This not only speaks of the apparent view by Autodesk that it's customers are stupid, but also seems to point out that Autodesk is not able to see that those same customers would be angry when/if Softimage failed to survive on 'Life Support'. It seems obvious to me, and should have to Autodesk, that basically maintaining Softimage would not be enough, and would be a self-realized death sentence for the software, especially when the ROI was calculated. If customers got angry and stopped paying subscription and froze their version of it because of a lack of innovation, one would think that someone with a reasonable amount of business experience could see that the situation was only going to get worse with the clear lack of innovation and advancement continuing with regards to Softimage. This would HAVE to lead to an EOL decision. Autodesk is a corporation, decisions are made based on money. We should have seen that, but Autodesk should have, too. Our biggest mistake, as Softimage users (besides trusting Autodesk to know things like this) was to not go with our gut feeling that Softimage's days were numbered. We all knew it in our bones in 2008, but we really knew it when the team was reassigned and a new team offshore was contracted. However, had we known the plan to minimally invest in Softimage a year and a half ago, we would have been that much further along the path to learning new software to run our businesses. Yes, some of that software would have been other DCC apps not in the Autodesk sphere. It was just rudely assumed that we would want to make the switch to May or Max. Perhaps most of us would have if we knew ahead of time. Now, all that has happened is Autodesk has alienated and angered formally loyal customers and been given a non-choice of either Max or Maya. We even had to argue to be able to use the software past the 2 year mark, so commenting as you do in the article that we can always keep using Softimage is an insult, since that WASN'T always an option, until we argued for it. Had we been given an honest roadmap of the plans to minimally invest in Softimage, we would have more control over our own futures. We could have controlled the client perception of why we were using a new software application, but now we are in a defensive position and are forced to make excuses for why we are A) either still using EOL software, or B) changing to another DCC. In either of those cases, Autodesk just passed the buck to us and hung us out to dry. Does this sound, to anyone, like a good way to treat valued customers? 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