@Matt: I think Soft was sold to MS for a lot less than 300. Tempted to say
less than half that. Mostly I remember MS making a good profit, and I was
around and not long after that joined Avid. MS -> Avid is the one that
scratched close to 300M I think.
@Luc-Eric
Matt has better memory than you in this case :)
REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- SOFTIMAGE and Discreet Logic,
Inc. announced today they have settled a dispute over the ownership
and distribution rights to the image-processing software FLAME. Under
the terms of the settlement, both companies have agreed that Discreet
Logic is the owner of FLAME and that Discreet Logic will continue to
distribute FLAME. The parties have agreed to keep the terms of the
agreement confidential, and no further information will be released.
SOFTIMAGE develops, markets and supports a fully integrated family
of interactive software tools that enables designers and animators to
create high-quality, photo-realistic 2-D and 3-D imagery. In June
1994, SOFTIMAGE became a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft
Corporation.
NOTE: Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft
Corporation. SOFTIMAGE is a registered trademark of SOFTIMAGE, a
wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.
-0- 10/12/94
/CONTACT: Press Only: Leslie Kesselring or Lisa MacKenzie of
Waggener Edstrom, 503-699-0856/
(MSFT)
And I would argue the most common interpretation of MS buying Soft wasn't
cool rubbing off, that was considered a nice side effect at best, but more
wedging into highly scaling/highly performing focused markets in a
non-corporate way, and graphics were picked as the venue for that. See NT
3.5.1
That's what I heard most of the time from most of the well informed people
who've operated at the necessary altitude to hazard a guess.
On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:38 PM, Luc-Eric Rousseau <luceri...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
> Personally, I've never heard anything about a court battle between
> Softimage and Discreet. The only interesting bit is between the two
> company is that Discreet was founded by the sales director of Softimage and
> sold Eddie before handing it over to Softimage and going with Flame instead.
>
> I'm also not aware of any Avid developer jumping ship and coming to DS.
> What weird things to just drop here as facts.
>
> The more common interpretation of history is that Microsoft bought
> Softimage because of 3D and film VFX was cool and they were hoping the
> Hollywood glamour would rub on them.
>
>
>
--
Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it
and let them flee like the dogs they are!
