Wow, quite interesting. With Alias up for sale, now XSI, i'm surprised that a company like Adobe didn't make a run at SoftImage in an attempt to get into the shrinking animation software industry. Would be strange/interesting to see them fighting it out with Autodesk. Just my rambling thoughts.
The writing was probably on the wall for a long time. I was interested in the foundation version of their software, and then they just pulled the rug out from under that. I was put off from purchasing any 3d software after that, and happily converted to Blender.
I wonder how this affects the XNA partnership. They said they were looking at allowing XNA programmers to use ModTool to make content for their commercial games. That's probably out the window now. I was warning people that ModTool was a dead end, looks like I'm probably right.
I wonder how this affects the XNA partnership. They said they were looking at allowing XNA programmers to use ModTool to make content for their commercial games. That's probably out the window now. I was warning people that ModTool was a dead end, looks like I'm probably right.
I want to think not. Fuck, this changes everything. What happens to Mod Tool? Autodesk let Gmax die off. Wasn't stable anyway.
To be honest, not much has changed with Maya.... and I mean that in a BAD way.
I mean, with the Maya, and Mudbox acquisitions, I was hoping there would be some better integration tools between them, maybe benefit from each other strengths, but nope. nada. nuthin. Max and Maya are still as different as can be, and the noticeable flaws within each program are still there.
I doubt there's much communication between the Maya and Max teams.
They'll likely just leave everyone be, and let them to continue to duke it out amongst themselves, and just reap the financial benefits.
to be honest autodesk are shooting themselves in the foot, trying to drive off other companies by buying them and (im having a stab in the dark here but) increasing price will mean just more illegal downloads of programs which we all know is very common, to be fair £2000 is alot of money.
That's a great point. This move makes me seriously question why the fuck I bother to pay for software. Maybe I'm just an idiot for putting a little faith into companies that they'll do what's right for me as a user of their products. It sucks that I'm becoming rather used to being sold out as a user, especially since autodesk has bought 4 of the products I've paid for in the past few years (motion builder, maya, mudbox and now xsi). I'm not even really angry at autodesk so much as I am at the companies that sell out. When my software investments turn into duds, I become less interested in spending my money when the end result is the same.
That's a great point. This move makes me seriously question why the fuck I bother to pay for software. Maybe I'm just an idiot for putting a little faith into companies that they'll do what's right for me as a user of their products.
Well, I can say this move has saved me from useless spending. So much for investing and supporting.
Whether it's music, games, or software...piracy does appear to be the best option in the end. Just do whatever it takes to get paid.
I'd like to see them buy puppetshop and include it also...
We've had this discussion before but I'll have it again. Big companies buying indie software results in the functional end of the software. If I find a PuppetShop bug, or need a new feature I can't write myself, I can have it in literally minutes if Kees is online. Try this with Max- you have to hire an Autodesk engineer for an ABSURD rate, or wait till someone else pays an engineer so it'll be in the next patch or release. Goddamn, in a thread about how Autodesk is buying and raping the competition, it seems borderline idiotic to encourage companies to buy and rape even more software. Sorry to be harsh but this is a real sticking point of mine, and reality has borne out this assessment over and over.
What drives a business to innovate when there is no competition? You don't need to be a genius to see this is very bad news.
Anyone else see this as a good thing? Probably the best thing to happen to the industry since I don't know what. Autodesk just killed off the last of their competition. And now all of us spineless Max whiners who were holding out for the day we'd be able to switch to XSI or something not-Autodesk, those days aren't going to come about unless we goddamn do something about it. We've seen two and a half packages dominate our entire industry for its entire lifetime- there will finally be new options, new growth, new ideas. People aren't going to sit around and wait for Autodesk to fix their problems anymore and there certainly is less incentive for Autodesk to improve anything now. We've already seen Autodesk hit its peak and this is on the not-surprising downward slope- did no one see this coming? This business model has been around as long as business has. Buy out and rape, sorry I mean 'integrate', your competitors. And it has never worked. So excuse me if I'm giddy because I see a brighter future down the road- I wasn't going to be using XSI for at least the next 2 years or so anyway.
Yes, the day is dark, but the day is darkest before the dawn.
W Try this with Max- you have to hire an Autodesk engineer for an ABSURD rate, or wait till someone else pays an engineer so it'll be in the next patch or release.
Not only that, but if company X hires an engineer to make a feature change, including a bug fix, they own the change and can decide whether or not that goes into the common code base.
YES.
You can pay for a bugfix and then prevent it being a bugfix to anyone but yourself.
Sorry if this is some hip sarcasm that I don't get.
It isn't hip sarcasm. You may be interested in this thread over at tech-artists.org.
People are upset with Max and increasingly upset with Maya. Now XSI doesn't seem like such a viable alternative- I certainly wouldn't switch from Max to Maya and I wouldn't make a switch from Max to XSI at this point either, whereas I would have jumped at the opportunity this morning.
I'm optimistic for the same reason I don't think your Photoshop comparison is fair. We are using software founded for a distinctly different paradigm than it was designed for. If someone comes up with new, and needed, way to revolutionalize the 2D software industry, Photoshop will have a competitor. But the situation isn't there for that. The situation is different in the 3D market- people fucking hate Autodesk. I get a little bit sick every time I start 3ds Max- I don't think it is the same with Photoshop users, at least none I've spoken to. There isn't the same pressing need for change or innovation, at least not yet.
This isn't about replacing Autodesk, or Max or Maya or XSI. To do so would be to miss the point entirely, it would be a program no better than any of them, because it would be the same old-school, bloated paradigm. It is about creating a new type of 3d program, not taking them on head-on.
Rob G's point is about competition. If a product (or in this case, all the products) have no competition then there is no incentive to innovate.
Furthermore, 3DStudio Max under the hood is a fucking disaster. Each time they have a new release they 'fix' their broken shit by writting new commands instead of fixing the old ones.
It's ridiculus....and these are the people that make the framework i have to develop in, and now they bought my only relaistic alternative.
I'm really surprised that Avid would sell off XSI after making such drastic changes and devoting so much time to things like ICE. I'm really not sure how I'll feel about this later, but right now I'm shocked and concerned.
P.S. - To be honest, I have been impressed with the advancements to maya since autodesk acquired them. 2009 looks like a fuller release than I've seen since I started, although I haven't used any maya version prior to 6.0. Naturally, you can't tell before using it, but over all I think they've been doing at least as good, if not tons better than alias. I thought they were hilariously in debt when they were acquired anyway.
Furthermore, 3DStudio Max under the hood is a fucking disaster. Each time they have a new release they 'fix' their broken shit by writting new commands instead of fixing the old ones.
True +1.
I've had the displeasure of working with 3DSMax engineers developing a custom authoring tool for Sony. And while the guys were really cool and fun, it was a fucking mess and a complete waste of 10's of thousands of dollars on something that didn't even work a little bit.
Sad times. It seems that the flagging economy is encouraging companies to tighten their belts in some very interesting ways. If the economy were rosier, I wonder if Avid would have been quite so keen on selling. With Autodesk already having such a huge market share with 3D Max and Maya, I can see how XSI's division of Avid could have been seen as a lost cause. (at least in terms of marketshare)
I don't think this is good though. All three of the industry-standard 3D software packages are under one corporate umbrella. One, or possibly even all of them will get the short end of support. On the plus side, this will give smaller 3D package developers a chance to shine. If Autodesk fails to properly develop their existing offerings, you can be sure that ambitious underdogs will be quick to take advantage of their complacency.
I successfully built and installed my first Linux box last night. Debian-flavored. With this whole Autodesk mess, I'm happier than ever to be getting into the open-source scene. I've been using Blender for years, and I'm now proficient with The Gimp and Open Office.
It's not *that* bad. I mean Maya's had some pretty sweet releases under Autodesk, not to mention the prices have dropped. Subscription is great and even cheaper to upgrade than it was with Alias.
XSI will live on.
But the worst situation is now we are faced with a monopoly...I hope this news doesn't radically change anything.
Sure they can, they just have to buy the main guys off and hire them. But what will happen is that it will be frozen at the last release, and we'll have that source code to work with as a community. But it would die off quickly, or become a convoluted mess.
Sure they can, they just have to buy the main guys off and hire them. But what will happen is that it will be frozen at the last release, and we'll have that source code to work with as a community. But it would die off quickly, or become a convoluted mess.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Blender is supported and maintained by the Blender Foundation, which is essentially a non-profit organization that raises money in order to keep supporting the development of Blender. If they hired away the current Blender developers, the Blender Foundation would just hire new ones to take their place. And since Blender's source is available to the general public (and has been for some time) it is impossible for Autodesk to effectively purchase that. The best they could hope for is to buy out the Blender Foundation itself, and effectively collapse the regular financial backing that Blender development recieves. But of course, anyone who wanted to could step in to fill that void.
You can't really stamp out open-source projects, since they effectively ignore the monetary element. Autodesk "makes" 3D Studio to make money. Most open-source software is for hobbyists, and is developed for fun and practice. If 3D Max stopped selling, its days would be numbered. A program like Blender is currently not selling, and its flourishing, with more support than ever before. Although one of Blender's advantages is that it's primary development support has always been in Europe. European nations have always been a lot keener on offering grants to projects like Blender. There's no way you could convince the US government to provide a grant for a project like that.
I know what OSS is and how it works. Like I said, we'd get the source frozen at the last version and could do what we wanted with it.
OSS projects die all the time. In fact most get abandoned and just end up an abandoned source forge entry.
Blender works for the same reason the other 4 or 5 successful OSS projects work. It's a consistent group who treat it like a real commercial project. It knows what it is, and it knows where it's going. There is a team working on a common goal together, and not splintered groups of people fighting and working on 15 different broken implementations of the same functionality.
If random people just start working on it, it would turn into a mess like most OSS projects. If Autodesk were to hire away all the big time blender players, and the Foundation had to start bringing in new random people, they might recover their momentum.
Source code is not lego. You can't just download it, and start effectively adding on to it right away. A big computer program is created from nothing and built up with millions of lines of code. It can take ages to study it all, and start to understand how it works, and then be able to continue where someone left off without breaking it all. It can often be hard to understand other programmer's code. Especially if al the current guys all jumped ship and there was no go to guys to help ease the transition.
They could recover eventually. But a new team couldn't keep up the pace of advancement the current team is achieving. They have been adding big features every 2 or 3 months.
Anyways, back on topic. It could very well be that whoever started XSI's plan all along was to make their profit by just developing something to sell to the bigger company.
I doubt Blender would die from a buyout (and it wouldn't benefit much anyway). It would most likely be forked and supported by the heavy hobbyist Blender community as of current. A mess? Time will have to tell if that ever happens
Also closed source projects dying is a worse matter when you deal with bitrot of no future improvement. At all. This is a pretty stark contrast compared to freely available open source software with a license that required you to share the source you modified as well. I can't see how that would make things permanently 'dead', it can only be abandoned. With a sizable community, I highly doubt that can happen.
Autodesk is evil. I grew my hate of them when the Half-Life SDK only had .max files. That meant I needed to buy 3D Studio MAX 2. (There was no Milkshape at the time or any method to import SMD formats)
Screw that.
Don't forget about newtek. They're still...potential hostile takeover victims
I doubt Blender would die from a buyout (and it wouldn't benefit much anyway). It would most likely be forked and supported by the heavy hobbyist Blender community as of current. A mess? Time will have to tell if that ever happens...
But whose broken fork are you going to use? Whose broken fork is your friend going to use? Hobbyist forking never helps in reality. You need a professional style team.
Lots of OSS falls into that trap. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
It will stifle adoption at a time when it's starting to pick up steam. A lot of people now are talking about blender in a much more positive light than back in the 2.30 or 2.20 days. 2.50 is looking to be a big release, especially with the long awaited interface overhaul.
People are starting to see it as a viable alternative, and the advantages of that blender can offer over the big overpriced programs. I've seen that attitude on many boards.
Hiring up all these programmers and stifling the progress of their competitor is good for their bottom line. They don't want a company who usually buys thousands of volume licenses deciding to go with Blender instead.
I think Avid bought Softimage years ago for like $285 Million, and they sold it to Autodesk for $35 Million? Am I getting something wrong? If not then Autodesk got away like bandits on that deal.
Here's to hoping that XSI stays a stable application. That's something it really had over the Autodesk line-up.
Still, it's a shame to see XSI go under. The new ICE stuff they had looked really sweet. Bound to light a fire under the other major packages Autodesk owned... guess that was just too much of a risk so they got bought
It'll now stagnate like everything else Autodesk've bought.
How frigging lame...
This seems too much like a monopoly to me at this point. I wish I had some faith in Autodesk, but they have been incredibly bad at bringing about innovations, or top quality, or anything I appreciated, for many years.
- last quarter softimage sold more seats of XSI than at any other time. We're not being sold because we are a failing business, we're being sold because our business doesn't mesh with the core Avid business. My understanding is that we are being acquired because of the strength of our product line.
Reading some of the posts on CGTalk, it kind of sounds like Avid was the one who initiated the sale, and Autodesk just happened to be the one to buy. Rather than Autodesk acting as the predator to snatch up a competitor.
If they had to sell, im glade it was autodesk that grabed them and not some shitter company that didnt have the funds to continue r and d. That being said, fuck avid. Way to have absolutely no loyalty to your product. its all about numbers and thats wack.
Just heard rumors that Autodesk is going to buy up Portugal next!!!! Damn them, Damn them to hell!!!!!! Haha, just kidding, but man I didn't think they would take over XSI myself, I use Max, and was planning on learning Modo, but if they are moving the way they are I should just stick with Max and wait for the next update which might be MaxamayaXSImodo.
i wish autodesk would buy portugal Spark, that way people would stop looking at their bellybuttons on that country and aknowledge theres life outside that shitty country
shame for this , one step further for shitty re realeses of the same software with the year next to it.
Just heard rumors that Autodesk is going to buy up Portugal next!!!! Damn them, Damn them to hell!!!!!! Haha, just kidding, but man I didn't think they would take over XSI myself, I use Max, and was planning on learning Modo, but if they are moving the way they are I should just stick with Max and wait for the next update which might be MaxamayaXSImodo.
As far as Blender goes it is true that Autodesk is not going to be able to buy them out and their odds of hiring away more than a small percentage of the top developers are very small. A number of them are already employed full time as Blender devs, some of them are college students working on their theses, some of them are from countries with less than favorable relationships with the rest of the world, some of them are FOSS fanatics, etc.
I also dont see Blender being abandoned any time soon, especially if its going to eventually be the only general purpose 3D app not owned by Autodesk.
The real threat (to Blender and others) is that Autodesk stops supporting formats non-Autodesk programs can use. For example: Why waste the money buying out Zbrush or beating it feature for feature when they can just make Mudbox the only application that can be used reliably/conveniently in an AutoMaxayaxsi pipeline.
Ahaha thanks vig, that's definitely my new splash screen. Hopefully XSI gains more speed than it could lose, it's definitely been the most promising package to emerge over the past few years.
Wish I could change my XSI splash screen to that, when I first saw that I did it with my max copy. My feelings as a XSI user I love 7 it does everything I need it to do right now, see what the future holds but right now meh won't affect me for a bit yet.
Replies
I wonder how this affects the XNA partnership. They said they were looking at allowing XNA programmers to use ModTool to make content for their commercial games. That's probably out the window now. I was warning people that ModTool was a dead end, looks like I'm probably right.
I want to think not.
I mean, with the Maya, and Mudbox acquisitions, I was hoping there would be some better integration tools between them, maybe benefit from each other strengths, but nope. nada. nuthin. Max and Maya are still as different as can be, and the noticeable flaws within each program are still there.
I doubt there's much communication between the Maya and Max teams.
They'll likely just leave everyone be, and let them to continue to duke it out amongst themselves, and just reap the financial benefits.
Funny I was going to buy the latest from AVID.
Well, I can say this move has saved me from useless spending. So much for investing and supporting.
Whether it's music, games, or software...piracy does appear to be the best option in the end. Just do whatever it takes to get paid.
We've had this discussion before but I'll have it again. Big companies buying indie software results in the functional end of the software. If I find a PuppetShop bug, or need a new feature I can't write myself, I can have it in literally minutes if Kees is online. Try this with Max- you have to hire an Autodesk engineer for an ABSURD rate, or wait till someone else pays an engineer so it'll be in the next patch or release. Goddamn, in a thread about how Autodesk is buying and raping the competition, it seems borderline idiotic to encourage companies to buy and rape even more software. Sorry to be harsh but this is a real sticking point of mine, and reality has borne out this assessment over and over.
Anyone else see this as a good thing? Probably the best thing to happen to the industry since I don't know what. Autodesk just killed off the last of their competition. And now all of us spineless Max whiners who were holding out for the day we'd be able to switch to XSI or something not-Autodesk, those days aren't going to come about unless we goddamn do something about it. We've seen two and a half packages dominate our entire industry for its entire lifetime- there will finally be new options, new growth, new ideas. People aren't going to sit around and wait for Autodesk to fix their problems anymore and there certainly is less incentive for Autodesk to improve anything now. We've already seen Autodesk hit its peak and this is on the not-surprising downward slope- did no one see this coming? This business model has been around as long as business has. Buy out and rape, sorry I mean 'integrate', your competitors. And it has never worked. So excuse me if I'm giddy because I see a brighter future down the road- I wasn't going to be using XSI for at least the next 2 years or so anyway.
Yes, the day is dark, but the day is darkest before the dawn.
Not only that, but if company X hires an engineer to make a feature change, including a bug fix, they own the change and can decide whether or not that goes into the common code base.
YES.
You can pay for a bugfix and then prevent it being a bugfix to anyone but yourself.
http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=37906;start=15#msg242119
It isn't hip sarcasm. You may be interested in this thread over at tech-artists.org.
People are upset with Max and increasingly upset with Maya. Now XSI doesn't seem like such a viable alternative- I certainly wouldn't switch from Max to Maya and I wouldn't make a switch from Max to XSI at this point either, whereas I would have jumped at the opportunity this morning.
I'm optimistic for the same reason I don't think your Photoshop comparison is fair. We are using software founded for a distinctly different paradigm than it was designed for. If someone comes up with new, and needed, way to revolutionalize the 2D software industry, Photoshop will have a competitor. But the situation isn't there for that. The situation is different in the 3D market- people fucking hate Autodesk. I get a little bit sick every time I start 3ds Max- I don't think it is the same with Photoshop users, at least none I've spoken to. There isn't the same pressing need for change or innovation, at least not yet.
This isn't about replacing Autodesk, or Max or Maya or XSI. To do so would be to miss the point entirely, it would be a program no better than any of them, because it would be the same old-school, bloated paradigm. It is about creating a new type of 3d program, not taking them on head-on.
Furthermore, 3DStudio Max under the hood is a fucking disaster. Each time they have a new release they 'fix' their broken shit by writting new commands instead of fixing the old ones.
It's ridiculus....and these are the people that make the framework i have to develop in, and now they bought my only relaistic alternative.
Autodesk makes me sick. There is no god.
-R
I'm really surprised that Avid would sell off XSI after making such drastic changes and devoting so much time to things like ICE. I'm really not sure how I'll feel about this later, but right now I'm shocked and concerned.
P.S. - To be honest, I have been impressed with the advancements to maya since autodesk acquired them. 2009 looks like a fuller release than I've seen since I started, although I haven't used any maya version prior to 6.0. Naturally, you can't tell before using it, but over all I think they've been doing at least as good, if not tons better than alias. I thought they were hilariously in debt when they were acquired anyway.
I've had the displeasure of working with 3DSMax engineers developing a custom authoring tool for Sony. And while the guys were really cool and fun, it was a fucking mess and a complete waste of 10's of thousands of dollars on something that didn't even work a little bit.
I don't think this is good though. All three of the industry-standard 3D software packages are under one corporate umbrella. One, or possibly even all of them will get the short end of support. On the plus side, this will give smaller 3D package developers a chance to shine. If Autodesk fails to properly develop their existing offerings, you can be sure that ambitious underdogs will be quick to take advantage of their complacency.
I successfully built and installed my first Linux box last night. Debian-flavored. With this whole Autodesk mess, I'm happier than ever to be getting into the open-source scene. I've been using Blender for years, and I'm now proficient with The Gimp and Open Office.
Damn The MAN!
XSI will live on.
But the worst situation is now we are faced with a monopoly...I hope this news doesn't radically change anything.
Sure they can, they just have to buy the main guys off and hire them. But what will happen is that it will be frozen at the last release, and we'll have that source code to work with as a community. But it would die off quickly, or become a convoluted mess.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Blender is supported and maintained by the Blender Foundation, which is essentially a non-profit organization that raises money in order to keep supporting the development of Blender. If they hired away the current Blender developers, the Blender Foundation would just hire new ones to take their place. And since Blender's source is available to the general public (and has been for some time) it is impossible for Autodesk to effectively purchase that. The best they could hope for is to buy out the Blender Foundation itself, and effectively collapse the regular financial backing that Blender development recieves. But of course, anyone who wanted to could step in to fill that void.
You can't really stamp out open-source projects, since they effectively ignore the monetary element. Autodesk "makes" 3D Studio to make money. Most open-source software is for hobbyists, and is developed for fun and practice. If 3D Max stopped selling, its days would be numbered. A program like Blender is currently not selling, and its flourishing, with more support than ever before. Although one of Blender's advantages is that it's primary development support has always been in Europe. European nations have always been a lot keener on offering grants to projects like Blender. There's no way you could convince the US government to provide a grant for a project like that.
OSS projects die all the time. In fact most get abandoned and just end up an abandoned source forge entry.
Blender works for the same reason the other 4 or 5 successful OSS projects work. It's a consistent group who treat it like a real commercial project. It knows what it is, and it knows where it's going. There is a team working on a common goal together, and not splintered groups of people fighting and working on 15 different broken implementations of the same functionality.
If random people just start working on it, it would turn into a mess like most OSS projects. If Autodesk were to hire away all the big time blender players, and the Foundation had to start bringing in new random people, they might recover their momentum.
Source code is not lego. You can't just download it, and start effectively adding on to it right away. A big computer program is created from nothing and built up with millions of lines of code. It can take ages to study it all, and start to understand how it works, and then be able to continue where someone left off without breaking it all. It can often be hard to understand other programmer's code. Especially if al the current guys all jumped ship and there was no go to guys to help ease the transition.
They could recover eventually. But a new team couldn't keep up the pace of advancement the current team is achieving. They have been adding big features every 2 or 3 months.
Anyways, back on topic. It could very well be that whoever started XSI's plan all along was to make their profit by just developing something to sell to the bigger company.
I doubt Blender would die from a buyout (and it wouldn't benefit much anyway). It would most likely be forked and supported by the heavy hobbyist Blender community as of current. A mess? Time will have to tell if that ever happens
Also closed source projects dying is a worse matter when you deal with bitrot of no future improvement. At all. This is a pretty stark contrast compared to freely available open source software with a license that required you to share the source you modified as well. I can't see how that would make things permanently 'dead', it can only be abandoned. With a sizable community, I highly doubt that can happen.
Autodesk is evil. I grew my hate of them when the Half-Life SDK only had .max files. That meant I needed to buy 3D Studio MAX 2. (There was no Milkshape at the time or any method to import SMD formats)
Screw that.
Don't forget about newtek. They're still...potential hostile takeover victims
Lots of OSS falls into that trap. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
It will stifle adoption at a time when it's starting to pick up steam. A lot of people now are talking about blender in a much more positive light than back in the 2.30 or 2.20 days. 2.50 is looking to be a big release, especially with the long awaited interface overhaul.
People are starting to see it as a viable alternative, and the advantages of that blender can offer over the big overpriced programs. I've seen that attitude on many boards.
Hiring up all these programmers and stifling the progress of their competitor is good for their bottom line. They don't want a company who usually buys thousands of volume licenses deciding to go with Blender instead.
Autodesk owns now the three mayor 3d applications on the market LOL. I'm wondering the same... why buy everything? 3d unification?
BTW, here another Modo user since first version! yay!
I was in the darkness with Max, and i saw the light with Modo
Here's to hoping that XSI stays a stable application. That's something it really had over the Autodesk line-up.
you're next, son.
http://www.softimage.com/
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=861491&postcount=13
Still, it's a shame to see XSI go under. The new ICE stuff they had looked really sweet. Bound to light a fire under the other major packages Autodesk owned... guess that was just too much of a risk so they got bought
It'll now stagnate like everything else Autodesk've bought.
im in grief, the tears mustv made me miss that post <weep>
http://www.fxguide.com/article505.html
The best thing about XSI was the support and the fact that not only did they add new things, but they actually fixed shit that didn't work.
Last time I used Max was version 6, but I dont recall Discreet doing either of those.
Thank god modo will have animation soon, but still this looks bleak.
This seems too much like a monopoly to me at this point. I wish I had some faith in Autodesk, but they have been incredibly bad at bringing about innovations, or top quality, or anything I appreciated, for many years.
Start switching over.
From the Sale Manager:
http://softimageinsider.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-additional-thoughts.html
Dont worry, blender is a shit app anyway.
Spark
shame for this , one step further for shitty re realeses of the same software with the year next to it.
then you'll wait quite a long time :P
I also dont see Blender being abandoned any time soon, especially if its going to eventually be the only general purpose 3D app not owned by Autodesk.
The real threat (to Blender and others) is that Autodesk stops supporting formats non-Autodesk programs can use. For example: Why waste the money buying out Zbrush or beating it feature for feature when they can just make Mudbox the only application that can be used reliably/conveniently in an AutoMaxayaxsi pipeline.