This is quite sad. Although I am a Maya and 3dsmax user, I feel the pain. shame on Autodesk. I was working at a VFX house that uses Softimage and Maya, They made the decision to switch to full Maya now.
Still not exactly an official announcement but it's directly from an authorised reseller, which lends a little extra legitness to the rumours - http://www.jigsaw24.com/news/news/11949-autodesk-softimages-retirement-what-you-need-to-know/
I can see Autodesk porting all the best tools from 3DSmax to Maya and then killing off 3DSmax in around 5-6 years time. I can also see Modo taking center stage during this transition.
Don't see why they'd give it up, the animation tools are still up there if not better than Mayas and the modelling is still great. It's not like Autodesk was actively supporting it since its acquisition, a few more years without support can't hurt.
What I'm hoping is that Autodesk has a separate team working on building a modern root application from scratch. Maya and Max are very powerful programs, but they are starting to show their age. You can only iterate on old code for so long...
Because as you said, Autodesk isn't a EU company. Business works completely different in the United States than it does in the EU (aka monopolies reign more freely). Sucks that Softimage is going to be killed off but I was already expecting something along those lines.
So how does it make you feel about the Maya acquisition? Autodesk always buys companies to kill them off except when they don't? Maybe it's my years in the MMO biz that drove home the idea that the customer's perception doesn't always line up with reality.
i wonder if in fact Max and SoftImage's days are limited what will happen to the studios who use them? Switch to Maya? Or it open an opportunities for studios to look at Modo and other programs more for production? In which case Autodesk could start to lose their dominance. All just rumors for now though.
Modo is already owned by The Foundry. I doubt Autodesk will buy The Foundry. Just like they didn't buy Pixologic yet. I think if they could they would buy Pixologic in heartbeat. Though, who knows. I still wonder why Autodesk was able to buy XSI. Does Softimage managment gone greed-mad and when they saw tens of milions…
Yeah I have seen it on http://www.si-community.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4960. The reseller took the page down. Maybe because its not official by autodesk and they are not allowed to publish it at the moment. But yeah, this is really sad. If its 100% true, I would really miss ICE and the intuitive user interface :(