Not going to argue over this as it's been gone around in circles for 3
weeks now. Plenty of posts by Maurice and Chris about why they've done
it this way (whether you agree or not), why they can't sell it any
longer. The current user base has their options.
I'm thankful we can have access to Softimage for however long we need
for the transition. 3-6 years, whatever.
I'm out,
Eric T.
On Wednesday, March 26, 2014 1:37:21 PM, Paul Griswold wrote:
Right. That's how I understood it as well. My point was, this could
have been slightly less of a PR disaster if they'd not completely
murdered Softimage, but instead set it up as a "graceful transition"
to Bifrost. Allow Softimage to continue to be purchased as part of
the Suites program until the point at which Bifrost makes it obvious
that ICE is no longer necessary.
Instead they've set themselves up for a situation where Autodesk has
absolutely no answer to Houdini at all for sale, and a promise of
Bifrost being an amazing new technology. SideFX and The Foundry
aren't going to sit on their hands while Autodesk builds Bifrost, so
IMHO the best business decision would have been to try to mitigate any
losses by keeping Softimage available to the public while Bifrost matures.
You'd think after what happened with Sumatra versus Maya they'd have
realized it's not a good idea to create a vacuum for too long.
-Paul
