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Hi,
I would really like some day this kind of interview about how exactly Softimage was fucked up, I mean a real insight interview...
I saw this video yesterday, because the Amiga is the root of everything about graphic and 3d art for me, that's crazy...

I think people that run Softimage stopped believing it. They thought it was a dead end with code. I think Luceric once called it a giant dll.

Also Luceric said that many went to develop a sort of Unreal/ICE in Autodesk and in the end nothing came of it.

I think Softimage Co. was pretty well run, the thing I had an issue with is that they were thinking that their salvation was in games, they wanted to go into game middleware and even tried to buy a game engine towards the end at Avid. Autodesk had the same idea and only gave it up last year, after 10 years of failing, and with much bigger resources than Softimage could have dreamt of.

I think the traditional video market for Softimage was much bigger than they thought and they could have made more inroads there into it if Avid had not sold it.

Softimage|XSI here in Germany had it´s strength in the commercial production..and partially still has. All the bigger companies like Sehsucht, Liga01, schoenheitsfarm and so on were XSI houses. It has it´s big strength in super efficient workflow and versatility, not at least due to ICE. It was a (almost) perfect mix between "point and click" and "procedural workflow". The game middleware thingy "they" had in mind for so many years nobody understood over here...it never was a core thing for XSI. Marketing was poor all the time. Especially with AD, where XSI never even surfaced on their ME website..

..and concerning the video, I guess it´s not 1 to 1 transferable to Softimage and XSI...but some points might fit 100%. The lack of a business plan might be one point. Not exactly knowing the own core competence and knowing their clients in depth might be an other... AD and Escom also seem to have some thing in common: "They even did not take a look at it..".

Yeah Avid could have done a sort of thing that C4D and After Effect have.

One of the reasons i did not understand ICE development - the ICE modelling was a weak effort , Lagoa was another one time try- is that they never developed a Mograph tool.

As you may recall, Avid was long gone by then. Lagoa is Softimage 2011 and ICE Modelling is Softimage 2012, years after the Autodesk acquisition.

Yes my mistake that it appeared that way. I was just trying to reinforce my point and came up as if the need for a Mograph tool only made sense with Avid.