[Tamerlin]

MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.

Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.

I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.

[rbanffy]

> MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly.

It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.

They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.

[Tamerlin]

They had a lot of help ruining SGI from... SGI.

The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.

Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.