Autodesk to acquire Lagoa?

[Hirazi Blue]

Hearing a rumor that Lagoa is in talks to be acquired byAutoDesk for around $62 million. Lagoa is a "cloud platform enabling 3D visualization of content for the engineering, architecture, media and entertainment sectors." The company has raised $6.9 million in funding and the 'venture firm formerly known as Atlas' partnerChris Lynch sits on the board.

(Quoted from here - via Mailing List, Ben Houston)

[jamination]

I don't pretend to know anything about these things, but boy that seems like a lot of cash for a company that just got started a few years ago (2x Softimage selling price). Does Logoa Renderer do a lot of business? Are they paying for what it might be someday, or the tech that is behind it? If it is for the tech then 69 million seems like they did pretty good for themselves unless it took an army of programmers to do it. Again I don't know jack, but wow.

[angus_davidson]

Just taking a guess, and taking into account where Autodesk is headed for their massive Cad / Cam stuff its very much purely the technology. As someone on the list mentioned I doubt very much it was bought for M&E although I am sure they will try an leverage it at some point.

[NNois]

this is crazy, i'm living on a cloud i know but this is clearly anti-competitive business practices, don't they have laws limiting that ?

[Pancho]

I'm not at all surprised. What else do a lot of start ups hope for than getting bought by a global player?

If you are angry about big companies buying the small ones, I'm with you. The lack of diversity knowadays is scary. P&G, Kraft, Unilever, Nestle, ..... Autodesk is just one of these companies. But it always takes two. Don't think for a minute that Lagoa didn't want this. 2-3 years of work for 1-10m Dollars? Who wouldn't want this?

It's just annoying since sometimes you put your hopes in these small companies nd then they seem to betray these hopes, being as "greedy" as the CEO buying them.

[Hirazi Blue]

Basically, all that Autodesk really wanted was to get Chinny back…
Seriously though, it would seem to be a ridiculous amount of money (if the rumors are correct, that is), but they’re probably not just buying the technology, but also the team behind it (especially Arno Zinke, I guess). The technology would appear to be very hot for the plans Autodesk apparently is making and getting the people who can harness this kind of tech seems a rather wise move as well.
Contrary to common belief: Autodesk isn’t stupid… ;)

And Thiago Costa can now finally buy his very own lagoa, of which he has so publicly been dreaming for all those years.

[FXDude]

No doubt it's great for Thiago (himself), (and that he's an authentically good guy, and that he very-much deserves it)
as it might have been great for Daniel Langlois (very personally) at the time of Microsoft,

But.. as you say Pancho, what gets lost (almost every time) whenever small(er) ones get absorbed?

Diversity/uniqueness/independence, which seems to become more and more scarce as time goes by,
to the point where there is but a few overarching entities (already)
and to which we then feel compelled to 'agree' (or 'put-up') with all sorts of things no way people would have 'agreed' to, had there been more options.

We often use the word "force", but no-one is technically "forced" to agree to anything.

You can always press "I Decline", but then when the application quits, what other options are left?

Which brings us back to the question of disappearing *diversity*,
and what we often end-up putting-up with, only because there just isn't much of it left (anymore), and not by mere consequence.

Though it seems that the limit of what people are willing to "put-up with",
seems to be getting more seriously tested at this very moment. (always pushed to the highest possible limit )

So you start seeing people getting happy(-er than usual) about Photoshop being very mature.
(...enough to tough an indefinite number of years)

[NNois]

So you start seeing people getting happy(-er than usual) about Photoshop being very mature.
(...enough to tough an indefinite number of years)

Yeh, sorry this is not my day, sorry, and you start with with adobe... just like autodesk this is a company where developers don't inovate, even a little.
And more importantly, they are not even able to make productive their software beeing staled between little updates who makes big money, or rewriting hugely important core function who don't makes directly money.
So yes, 20 years later from the first photoshop there is still zero mechanism for multi edition of layer properties, and the software is full of "windows open to confirm before doing anything else". This is exactly what you see on 3ds max, total nonsense nowadays, and totally unproductive software.
So yes i think lagoa will be just like that, autodesk will acquire the tech, make it available in a certain form but will don't continue to innovate on it, just because the purpose is to make money and not to make a great tool.