Softimage the best Autodesk tool against competition

[luceric]

I can understand the reasoning you say, but it's unsustainable, the latest m&e quarterly's bear that out,

A common misunderstanding, but actually, they don't. The numbers of Max and Maya keep growing every year. The reason why the M&E numbers were hedging lower is that every year more of Max's revenue comes from the CAD Suites and is not tabulated under M&E's number. The M&E global numbers are going to continue to hedge lower while more people get M&E products with non M&E Suites. M&E isn't losing any market share. Dream on.

Your (ad) trying to be monolithic, those days are ending fast, see lagoa as a good example, as well as logic, as well as fabric etc etc. To believe that things like the apps you mentioned cant / wont run on a ipad / win tablet - in the future, is well really a blinkered vision.

Autodesk already has Autocad running on the cloud and on mobile.. https://www.autocadws.com/ and other cloud/mobile colloaboration products https://360.autodesk.com/ and simulation and cloud rendering http://rendering.360.autodesk.com/ Before you say "Autocad WS isn't the same as Autocad", Lagoa isn't the same either of these. The "design platform" is s all marketing fluff at this point. And Fabric isn't doing ipad, web browser, or cloud service stuff anymore. They're only talking about programming libraries for the desktop right now.

Otherwise people like angus etc go elsewhere, where their $ is valued and accepted, and they get what they want! And if you (ad) cant figure out how to do it, nor don't see the reasoning why customers expectations are changing, then you end up a dinosaur. That's evolution.

Angus.. isn't that just an educational account? Anyways this whole talk of dinosaur, I did not expect to hear that from an actual XSI user. It sounds like you want to use this stuff on an iPad with your finger or throught the web, which is the sort of stuff you hear from people who don't do any actual 3D production and have techcrunch as their homepage.

[Bellsey]

Very fine data, but you're talking apples and oranges.

You simply cannot compare an iOS/Android app to professional software such as Maya, Houdini, Nuke...(basically pick one).
The market is different, with a different type of user/consumer, who perhaps don't mind wasting money on an app, because its only a few cents/pence/pounds/dollars.

Also, it wasn't that long ago, that Messiah had a fire sale and you could get it for just $10. I wonder how many people got that (and many did), played with it and then never really used much further. We also didn't really see a shift in users and studios suddenly moving to that product, even though I'm sure there are people actively using it. I'm not being detrimental about that either.

I can understand the reasoning you say, but it's unsustainable, the latest m&e quarterly's bear that out, the ever increasing the prices, you getting a smaller and smaller market, and if your honest you can see that subs, by the voices of all users, its becoming a grudge purchase, and one that has less and less inherent value, because latest m&e quarterly's. Round and round ad do.

Your (ad) trying to be monolithic, those days are ending fast, see lagoa as a good example, as well as logic, as well as fabric etc etc. To believe that things like the apps you mentioned cant / wont run on a ipad / win tablet - in the future, is well really a blinkered vision.

I think your smarter than that, I think anyone can(should) see the potential of lagoa, that could be on the app store, and what it means for remote cg development. Same is true for fabric engine changing their business model, again a smart move. I'm sure you can see how 1 Gig internet in London changes things, when you can download a hd movie in < 1 min.

Not seeing how people now dont see value in monolithic or subs is in some ways forgetting the history of where AD started and how it got big in cad, well times have changed again... More recently how newegg, a while back decided to close all its retail outlet, and dump resellers who offer no benefit in the days of internet connectivity, who now are now #1. Does anyone even know who #2 is? (rhetorical)

Why #1? because they got there first and did it right. They saw numbers like above and realized what was coming, and unlike like poor Angus, who gets screwed over because of outdated regional sellers, those days are coming to a close too. (you only need to look at the UK high street to see retailers collapsing). Similar example Dvd's region codes, does anyone care about those anymore?

Many a company now who still hold on too tight to what was, chasing an ever declining buck, just like Hollywood and others did/do, and have forgot, or don't see the above numbers and realize only far too late...

The all important credo...Give the consumers what -they- want, before they want it.

Otherwise people like angus etc go elsewhere, where their $ is valued and accepted, and they get what they want!

And if you (ad) cant figure out how to do it, nor don't see the reasoning why customers expectations are changing, then you end up a dinosaur. That's evolution.

There's nothing wrong in alot of what you say, and I'm not being blinkered at all. But do you think people are going to be using ipads etc to create visual effects work? Seriously? Touch screen interaction and UI's, well that's slightly difference.
Tablets and various devices will have their place and application, but there will be always be situations where they're just not suitable.

As for Autodesk itself, I'm well aware of the data and numbers, and I certainly won't be discussing their quarterly results and their performance. You're right, things are changing and Autodesk aren't blind to this. Yep, prices have changed and unfortunately for theirs been an increase, but Autodesk aren't the only ones. Didn't the Foundry tinker with their NUKE and MARI pricing recently?

To coin a phrase, it's only stupid people who think companies like Autodesk are entirely stupid. (I'm not finger pointing at you btw). Autodesk are changing alot, some of it is already visible and in many ways the new branding helps signify some of that. Some of the changes perhaps don't effect you or the M&E industry yet, but perhaps at some point they might do.

[Letterbox]

Anyways this whole talk of dinosaur, I did not expect to hear that from an actual XSI user. It sounds like you want to use this stuff on an iPad with your finger or throught the web, which is the sort of stuff you hear from people who don't do any actual 3D production and think everything should be a webapp.

We just want xsi developed faster, better and with more vision, and you (ad) aren't delivering.

legoa, no updates. Hair, no updates. MR, behind. Modeling tools, no updates. Ice Modeling nurbs, none. Direct X, regression to older version? Bugs from years ago. Still no pure linux, still running crappy MW...you want me to carry on?

As I have said before I have faith in the product, but not in the way it's being managed, and less over time in the development, tossing in a feature then letting it rot, is NOT a plan. Yet 1 man does the above development - puts you all to shame.

It's long over due someone there started cracking a whip & pulled the internet on you, stopping you all from playing World of Warcraft all day, and really started taking care of business.

Remember when you say your prayers at night,say thanks to God, for letting Autodesk get xsi, because no other company would let you get away with this less than minimum effort for so long. None.

[Letterbox]

Very fine data, but you're talking apples and oranges.

You simply cannot compare an iOS/Android app to professional software such as Maya, Houdini, Nuke...(basically pick one).
The market is different, with a different type of user/consumer, who perhaps don't mind wasting money on an app, because its only a few cents/pence/pounds/dollars.

Also, it wasn't that long ago, that Messiah had a fire sale and you could get it for just $10. I wonder how many people got that (and many did), played with it and then never really used much further. We also didn't really see a shift in users and studios suddenly moving to that product, even though I'm sure there are people actively using it. I'm not being detrimental about that either.

I can understand the reasoning you say, but it's unsustainable, the latest m&e quarterly's bear that out, the ever increasing the prices, you getting a smaller and smaller market, and if your honest you can see that subs, by the voices of all users, its becoming a grudge purchase, and one that has less and less inherent value, because latest m&e quarterly's. Round and round ad do.

Your (ad) trying to be monolithic, those days are ending fast, see lagoa as a good example, as well as logic, as well as fabric etc etc. To believe that things like the apps you mentioned cant / wont run on a ipad / win tablet - in the future, is well really a blinkered vision.

I think your smarter than that, I think anyone can(should) see the potential of lagoa, that could be on the app store, and what it means for remote cg development. Same is true for fabric engine changing their business model, again a smart move. I'm sure you can see how 1 Gig internet in London changes things, when you can download a hd movie in < 1 min.

Not seeing how people now dont see value in monolithic or subs is in some ways forgetting the history of where AD started and how it got big in cad, well times have changed again... More recently how newegg, a while back decided to close all its retail outlet, and dump resellers who offer no benefit in the days of internet connectivity, who now are now #1. Does anyone even know who #2 is? (rhetorical)

Why #1? because they got there first and did it right. They saw numbers like above and realized what was coming, and unlike like poor Angus, who gets screwed over because of outdated regional sellers, those days are coming to a close too. (you only need to look at the UK high street to see retailers collapsing). Similar example Dvd's region codes, does anyone care about those anymore?

Many a company now who still hold on too tight to what was, chasing an ever declining buck, just like Hollywood and others did/do, and have forgot, or don't see the above numbers and realize only far too late...

The all important credo...Give the consumers what -they- want, before they want it.

Otherwise people like angus etc go elsewhere, where their $ is valued and accepted, and they get what they want!

And if you (ad) cant figure out how to do it, nor don't see the reasoning why customers expectations are changing, then you end up a dinosaur. That's evolution.

There's nothing wrong in alot of what you say, and I'm not being blinkered at all. But do you think people are going to be using ipads etc to create visual effects work? Seriously? Touch screen interaction and UI's, well that's slightly difference.
Tablets and various devices will have their place and application, but there will be always be situations where they're just not suitable.

As for Autodesk itself, I'm well aware of the data and numbers, and I certainly won't be discussing their quarterly results and their performance. You're right, things are changing and Autodesk aren't blind to this. Yep, prices have changed and unfortunately for theirs been an increase, but Autodesk aren't the only ones. Didn't the Foundry tinker with their NUKE and MARI pricing recently?

To coin a phrase, it's only stupid people who think companies like Autodesk are entirely stupid. (I'm not finger pointing at you btw). Autodesk are changing alot, some of it is already visible and in many ways the new branding helps signify some of that. Some of the changes perhaps don't effect you or the M&E industry yet, but perhaps at some point they might do.

I always have faith in the intelligence of UK citizens, just not much in some canadians, some things never change ;)

[angus_davidson]

Angus.. isn't that just an educational account? Anyways this whole talk of dinosaur, I did not expect to hear that from an actual XSI user. It sounds like you want to use this stuff on an iPad with your finger or throught the web, which is the sort of stuff you hear from people who don't do any actual 3D production and have techcrunch as their homepage.

Wow , take a nice dip in condensation pond did we. Admittedly I don't expect you to understand all of the issues we face in education. Or in markets outside of your comfort zone. We are rather used to being treated as 3rd rate citizens when it comes to people thinking that we don't spend as much time on a 3d package as those folks who use in every day. The reality is we cant.

Its the people us educators teach SI to, that go into the studios, that show their new places of business that there is a really great alternative to Maya. They make up a lot of the small starter studios that buy SI as their first legal 3d package. You might want to think about that. Personally I dont think its too bad for Just an educational account.

As a somewhat funny co incidence we do actually do help folks do basic 3d on an Ipad. We showed the genetics department how to use 123d Creature to allow their first years to understand genetic inheritance by creating simplistic creatures, and adapting them. Not all 3D is vfx and animation. Our goal is to allow people to easily understand and master what it is they want to do. whatever that may be.

[FabricPaul]

Just to add some perspective from the XSI sales side - all Foundation did was make selling of regular XSI seats very difficult, and made selling maintenance even harder ("I could just buy Foundation, you need to make us a deal"). It didn't lead to a flood of new users, because price is not the deciding factor in the professional market. You can be so expensive that nobody will touch you, but you can't be so cheap that everyone will use your product.

As for cloud/web - there is opportunity in streamed applications and centralised processing, we can already stream Creation applications to the browser: http://vimeo.com/59427748 - however, for us it's just another platform that a customer might choose to use. We aren't building a service on top of that technology. Our main issue is always around latency - if you stream mouse interaction then the UI feels horrible. There are technologies around that reduce this, but it's still noticeable. This limits use cases to viewing/playback rather than content creation. Latency is less of an issue on a LAN, so I think there are many cool things that could happen around centralized data and streamed sessions to that data. Whether that's through a browser or not is another question - there is no dependency on being browser-based. Having spent time with browser tech, and having seen the recent mobile shift away from html5, I'm unconvinced that browsers are the way forward. Web technology is much more than browsers.

I don't see 'it's on the cloud' as something that makes people choose a technology - it just sounds cool (and we milked that one ourselves ). If you're offered the choice of continuing to use XSI, or you can switch to Maya running in a browser, how many of you are going to shift? However - if you were offered the opportunity to run Soft through a browser, you might take a look (data storage and IP issues not withstanding). The cloud/browsers are just other platforms - technology decisions are more complex than 'but it's in the browser'.

end of ramble.

[Bullit]

cloud (...) it just sounds cool

I don't think it sounds cool at all. For me just means loss of control.

[FabricPaul]

There are some very cool possibilities - keeping mind that you can 'own' your own cloud (either locally, which is basically a render farm, or by buying your own servers from Amazon or Rackspace), so think about it in that context. I'm really just talking about the benefits of centralized data, distributed and elastic processing, hybrid applications that run locally but share the heavy lifting (these will be desktop, mobile and browser tools).

[ojo3D]

Regarding Apples and Oranges, ;) my thoughts on possibilities, the future, adapting, forward thinking etc...


Just look at what this small developer is doing...

This is really cool. Very nice idea.

[angus_davidson]

cloud (...) it just sounds cool

I don't think it sounds cool at all. For me just means loss of control.

With Bullit on this one. The cloud is all well and good until the unexpected happens. When it does you have very little control over sorting out the problem. SLA's are nice in principle but if they dont power a data center if its power transformer gets tboned by a SUV. Which of course will be when your at the last 1% of your deadline ;) It is becoming a lot easier to set up your own clouds though so if your looking to set up that kind of thing you can, but within parameters you can control.