doh first sentence mistake "Bought by Microsoft" ________________________________ From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Chris Vienneau [chris.vienn...@autodesk.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2014 9:34 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: RE: An Open Letter to Carl Bass
HI Emilio, I think that now you have heard from Carl I think I will weigh in here and what I am writing comes from having been in and around softimage for twenty years as I grew up in Montreal and came onto the tech scene around 1993 when Softimage was on fire and right before it got bought by Autodesk. There is no doubt that Softimage starting in 1986 had the early lead in animation software and when I started at Discreet Logic even had a claim on Flame code with Eddie. Microsoft was a crazy rising star at that point and bought them up as all entertainment tools were sold on big ass SGI systems which almost killed me once or twice. They wanted to have a team to build out pro tools on windows at all costs. That was when Sumatra (1996) was started and many of the early decisions made then to highly leverage windows only tech was one of the biggest handicaps that this new code base developed around when Maya developed from an IRIX base. Maya started to appear in the late 90s and started to gain a lot of traction as people did not see the movement they wanted and many were scared by the windows direction. Given that 80% of work in film revolves around 20-30 companies that were around back then it is pretty easy to see how losing many of those customers back then can have a big impact now as the hundreds of companies that make up the film/vfx world mostly spawned from people coming from those original seed fx companies. And yes people built their own tools on top of Maya but back in 1998-1999 there were not that many tools period in either Sumatra or Maya except that Maya had a great API to build tools upon so it started to take off. As the transition to Avid happened the product and team were focused on the Digital Studio and more television workflows. They wanted to have a full suite around the media composer with DS and Soft being the poster children for a full post production workflow. Avid like many of us got hit really hard in the 2001 crash and if you want to read a great article on what happens when companies don't constantly re-invent themselves this is it: http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml . While 3dsmax continued down the path of being 3500$ and building a monster library of plugins Maya and Softimage fought customer by customer from 2002 to 2006. Maya was bought and sold three times and Avid starved out the softimage team while they were in a fight for their life. There have been other posts on other forums but Sumatra simply took too long to go from demo to product and many customers got tired of waiting. I was working on Combustion back in 2002-2004 and we saw Maya take off in many markets and many people switch away from Softimage. The numbers don't lie. In 2000 Softimage 3D had a bigger market share than 3dsmax and Maya in entertainment. By the time Autodesk acquired Maya in 2006, Avid was in the middle of its financial troubles having spent a lot of money to buy tons of companies and having a real hard time getting back to growth. Softimage was losing out in schools by that point and when Autodesk acquired Maya and got access to the global network of sales people places like India and east asia began to really solidify around Maya. Softimage always suffered at Avid because it was a broadcast company that did not really know what to do with this small independent minded group. So Softimage got the freedom to be themselves but they suffered when it came to resources. Autodesk is primarily driven by resellers and has been that way since 1978 when the founders started letting the first users of AutoCAD sell to their friends. Autodesk invests a huge amount in emerging markets and education. As work started to get outsourced to India and China there was a network of 3dsmax and Maya users waiting and that really was the biggest boom in the last few years for things like episodic animation, vfx (starting with rotoscoping), and games asset production. The product manager that was around for driving the ICE direction was my ex-boss and a very smart guy. Let's not mince words when this was an attempt to leap frog Houdini, 3dsmax and Maya as Softimage was not growing and losing money at Avid. ICE started as a particle project and then morphed into a more general framework. No one here at Autodesk is arguing you can't do amazing things with ICE and I think we have made it clear we are working on how that can complement Maya but you can't argue that it failed to convert enough Houdini, 3dsmax, and Maya users to Softimage to stop the decline of the revenue. This was despite every major FX house having the opportunity to try it and evaluate it. It was just not enough to switch from the tool base they had built in the early 2000s and it was just easier to find talent and new users from schools. So as we get to the acquisition by Autodesk the big damage to what was once a strong market share in film and games had already been done and the key engines needed to grow products which is a strong channel and education market had been also severely compromised. The Softimage team had done an amazing job given how little they were funded by Avid. I can tell you that Marc Petit ran 3dsmax, Softimage, and Maya with no master plan to merge them and there was a full team on XSI for the first few years of the acquisition with Chinny at the PM helm. We included it in the education suite giving it access to way more schools and for the first time it was available in many places where previously Avid did not have the reach or choose not to invest. We were very excited by the prospect of sharing technology and best practices with the soft team as they were the bitter enemy during the dcc wars. It was like getting to see the inside of a Russian sub as the Captain of a British sub and seeing how things had evolved over time. Soon after the acquisition we started investing in a new core that we hoped would power all three apps which became skyline and eventually bifrost. There are inherent limitations to ICE in terms of scalability that are linked with the host application (XSI) and we wanted to have something more portable that could be re-used in games as well. We also needed a core for all the cloud requirements we had coming down the pipe and we will get more into that in a second. So we had a good sized softimage team and an investment that matched the revenue so yes were profitable but the dev team was able to do new features and maintain the core. Soft settled into a niche with games in Japan and post vfx for television/advertising. When the recession hit in 2009, it was another shock to the system and we like everyone else in the industry laid off people and tightened our belts. When the economy recovered things were not the same in our industry. From 2010-2012 the VFX industry in the US collapsed and advertising started to get split between tv and online. The industry lost so many good small boutique companies in that run and many people moved onto other industries like mobile gaming instead of staying around and re-starting like they had in the past. The closure of Modus FX (a great FX house in Montreal) and even Rhythm and Hues show that there is a big problem in this industry and both of those companies made 1-2 mistakes in how they handled their cash flow and were gone in a heart beat. If you don't think that the Foundry and Houdini were not affected both have made big pushes into the game market recently. So the niche base of Soft was hit pretty hard by this trend and that would have happened had it been on its own, with a new mystery owner or with Avid. This trend resulted in the large companies getting bigger and the middle thinning out both in film and games and those disappearing soft seats did not resurface but went to Maya or Houdini. As things settled down in the last year or so it was clear that we needed to accelerate our plans for Bifrost and that as Maya and 3dsmax were growing Soft continued to shrink. We moved the development to Singapore and they are a great team capable of delivering cool features. So we made the decision late last year to move forward with the EOL plans of Softimage to focus and we are here. You can say it was foolish for Autodesk to think they could run three products that once competed but to put the blame for the current situation on our shoulders ignores the decisions made by Avid and Microsoft. A product needs a lot more than just technology to succeed and you can argue all that you want about which DCC is better but Soft did not have the ecosystem around it to be successful in the key years around 2000 when this industry was really wide open and shifting rapidly and Sumatra/XSI was just too late to the party. So no there is no conspiracy about trying to hold back softimage. XSI is a known entity and if people wanted to switch to it they would have already. If you visit the 3dsmax customers they like their mountain of plugins and if you visit Maya customers they like being able to customize the application. You are seeing Houdini has a loyal fan base. Just like with religion one person does not love god more or less because of their religion. Before we get to the two year limit and the cloud I will take a break. This is my interpretation of what happened based on my relationships with the softimage team that came from being in Montreal and the subsequent involvement since the acquisition. Before we get into the why can't we just maintain Soft I want to see if others share my view or have another opinion. cv/
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