???? Your history is skewed, Daniel.
Maya made it's debut in 1998 and was sold in modules at $7-10K USD apiece depending on the module. The whole package cost $35K USD. Softimage|XSI made it's debut in 2000 at just under $12K USD for the advanced license, and just under $6K USD for the essentials license. In 2002 Softimage was noticeably cutting into Maya's userbase with it's lower price and rapid development, but they got cocky and with XSI v3.0 raised their prices to $8K and $14K for essentials and advanced respectively. About two months later Alias|Wavefront wised up and dropped their price to near $7K USD for the complete package to undercut Softimage. Softimage didn't budge thinking they were the shizzle. That was the beginning of the end as I saw it. I was running an authorized Softimage training center in Chicago at the time. Prior to the price reductions I was getting an average of 15-20 calls per month for Softimage training with the numbers slowly increasing month over month. After the Maya price drop (April 2002), in less than 6 weeks Softimage training inquiries dropped to 2 inquiries per month and never recovered. I tried to tough it out another couple of years under the hope Softimage would learn it's lesson and regroup, but they never did and I had to close the business. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Daniel H Sent: Wednesday, September 12, 2012 7:20 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: In case you missed it.. Maya people are a dime a dozen and they typically get employed in a starting $30K to $35K USD range. Because there are so many Maya users running around, studios can employ a lot more of them for a dirt-cheap salary. Maya is only more prevalent in studios because it started out much cheaper than Softimage ($10K vs. $100K). Softimage is 24 years old and Maya is only 14 years old. All this time Maya has only been trying to play catch-up to SI. Autodesk could easily market SI, sell more seats, and uplift consumer confidence... but it doesn't want to. Autodesk is "suppressing" Softimage on purpose because it wants to, and because it can. Autodesk wants to market 3ds Max for architectural and Maya for entertainment. Softimage is just some side money that has an unknown future. All-in-all, jumping to Houdini is starting to look appealing. Daniel VFXM
