Don't put words in my mouth, Jason. I never said XSI was on death row, I said it was viable with a small cushion, but long term it's fate was already determined from the miscues which occurred during the Sumatra release, and further exacerbated from later misreads and missteps in the market such as raising prices when everybody was dropping prices.
As for your assessment, your analysis is flawed. I don’t' know where you got the XSIBase numbers considering the site has been offline for years. In any event, I don't consider those numbers very valid, but for the sake of argument I'll go with it. According to your numbers, 2007 was the peak with 275 jobs available. It was followed in 2008 with a ~40% drop to 168 jobs - the biggest year-over-year change in the entire data set. You point out ICE was released in 2008, which is true, but that didn't happen until August at Siggraph. You pointed out Autodesk bought Softimage in 2008, which is also true, but that wasn't announced until October. So, by your assessment, 40% of the annual jobs were lost in the months October, November, and December of 2008 because people dropped usage of Softimage overnight upon the announcement of the acquisition? I don't buy that - here's why: Let's assume 2008 was on the same pace as 2007 even though the trend in prior years was ascending. With simple arithmetic 275 / 12 = 22.91 --> ~23 jobs per month available. 3 x 23 = 69 jobs lost during last 3 months of 2008. 275 - 69 = 206 jobs for 2008 if Autodesk were the driving factor for the reduction. OK, but that still leaves 38 jobs unaccounted for (206 - 168 = 38). So what happened to cause the numbers to drop significantly in 2008? Hmmm....let me think...Oh, that's right, XSI v6.0 was released on the last day in 2006 (call it 2007) - the biggest lemon and disaster in XSI's history. Granted, cause of the problem was a screw-up at Avid HQ erroneously divulging a release when one wasn't planned forcing the team to put humpty dumpty together again in an insanely short time, but the damage was done. It required several service packs on short order to bail all the water out, and for many customers, like my company, we literally could not function on XSI 6.x with all it's bugs and corruptions, and the service packs often made things worse. Our production almost shut down because of it. We didn't get any relief until XSI 7.5 was released 18 months later in March 2008. I think that's a better cause/effect explanation for the drop in jobs - customers were turned off by the instability and irresponsibility of a company claiming to be a market leader making such a release. Autodesk and co. added their 2 cents later and certainly didn't help matters, but they weren't the driving force. If it weren't for ICE, Softimage would've been dead a lot sooner. Matt Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2016 21:01:30 -0400 From: Jason S <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Autodesk acquires Solid Angle To: [email protected] On 04/20/16 7:27, Matt Lind wrote: > The couple of versions of extra dev was just the benefit of having the > larger > staff for a short period of time. > > You can look at Softimage's market share any way you like, but it all > comes > back to they dropped the ball with 'Sumatra'. So it was already on death row? Soft may not have had the largest userbase, but despite it's previous growing pains, it was not only doing just fine, (because it was pretty good) it was climbing up t'il 2007-08 regardless of how avid was doing ... All until ICE came. 2003 90 2004 145 2005 160 2006 198 2007 275 2008 168 <-- ICE 2009 119 2010 109 2011 62 2012 26 I-I-I-C-C-C-E!!!!! (wait. what came practically at the same time as ICE?) Today it's less of everything that's awkward about both Maya and 3ds, (now with passes? Match transforms? UV Unwrap tools?) and it seems that it's to an extent because of the missing third, but I wouldn't say that it exactly makes-up for it, and would qualify it as largely still missing for what it had going for it most. But whatever now. ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
