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Alias In Acquisition Talks With Private Equity Firm
TeachingMachines writes "Alias, the makers of the venerable Maya 3D animation and effects software, have announced their possible sale to an unnamed 3rd party, described as a 'leading private equity investment firm'. Alias is currently owned by SGI, and the transaction is still considered to be tentative. I, for one, hope that SGI holds onto Alias, as in its current state it is arguably the best 3D modelling and animation suite available, and it is available for Linux. Cross your fingers..."
...says it'll be Apple.
Rumour has it Adobe and Apple are looking to scoop up Avid...
I think Maya is one of the most revolutionary products in software history not just for its tech capabilities, but the way they sell it.
To curb piracy of their full value product, they released a Personal Learn Edition that made all the features of the full product available, but put on a watermark that made the output useless for commercial use and encrypted the saved files so that the commerical version would not open them. Those who designed something and then sold it, however, could send their encrypted file in when they purchase their license to get it converted to a file their full version could open and output without the watermark. They also offered a $20 how-to DVD for those who wanted to learn the program with a minimal outlay of money.
They also made what could be the most dramatic price cut in software history, knocking their entry-level product's price from $7,500 to $1,999 and taking their high-level product from $16,000 to $7000. Clearly, they made it up on volume.
So, not only was this a great technical program, but it became priced so that even moderately-funded producers could afford the program, and therefore made it accessable to the people who needed it. I just hope these unnamed investors don't raise the prices back to where they were...
It's better if Alias separated itself from the sinking ship that is SGI. SGI is really losing its ability to hold onto any market share very quickly, and it's better that Alias avoids getting sucked down with SGI in an implosion.
There were rumors of apple buying 3dStudio back in December 2003. I couldn't see that happen because there is no current OSX Port. For apple to add that software to their Pro apps it would take quite a bit of development before being able to add that feather to their cap. That rumor must have confused 3dstudio with Alias Maya???
To curb piracy of their full value product, they released a Personal Learn Edition that made all the features of the full product available
While I think the reasoning behing the Personal Learning Edition was great, they implemented it poorly.
I developed an interest in 3D during uni, and explored 3Dsmax, lightwave, etc.
I was excited when I saw the PLE, so I grabbed it with the intention of learning.
No such luck.
The watermark on any finished product is a fine idea, but they place a huge watermark (and not exactly a subtle, transparent one) across the entire modelling view, which makes using the product for longer than about 20 minutes impossible unless you want a spliting headache.
This actually steered me away from Maya, so I ended up sticking with 3dsmax for my uni subjects.
control. Apple needs to control a market. They need it to walk away from Windows, and be able to pull it away from OSS. Steve has bought many of the other packages over the last 1.5 years. So yeah, I would agree with the parent that most likely it is Steve.
There is one problem with this. Jobs has been upfront with his buys. With the hiding and slinking going on, I would suspect that it is Gates doing it to make sure that Apple does not control a market.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
it is under a starightfoward license.
their free version (as in cost) is closed, but free (as in cost).
their commercial version is closed, but it will cost you.
the only difference is that the free version places a watermark on the finished product.
noone's "pussyfooting around the whole oss issue". this clearly has nothing to do with open source software.
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I bet you Apple is the un named third party. This year they are going to have a HUGE presence at SIGGRAPH 04, and I bet you this is one of those reasons. Apple is looking for domintation in markets it currently has an edge in, namely music production and video production. And Apple seems to be doing this job very well. Coupled with Renderman for the G5, and Shake + Final Cut Pro + Maya + Renderman + Logic Pro, and the mac does everything you need for movie production
Pontiac of course, in a desperate effort to redesign the Aztek.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No offence to SGI, I really loved their products, but sadly, I think they are a sinking ship. A few years ( perhaps even just a year back ) when Alias renamed itself from Alias Wavefront to just alias, and moved prices from 7500$ per unit to like 2000$, it looked like alias was about to follow suit. For years, Maya and before that, Power Animator lead the way in 3d graphics, and they are still an industry leader.
:) It would be a shame to see Alias and their products go away should SGI go the way of the dodo ( which is a very probrable thing to happen ).
I think the best thing that could happen is to seperate themselves away from SGI as much as possible. This has been happenning to some degree already. If you recall a few years back, the URL used to be www.aw.sgi.com , now its www.alias.com... odd that
As to the unnamed suitor, thats a bit hard to guess. Number 1... its most likely not Microsoft... they tried this game once. When NT 4 was new, they were the proud owners of SoftImage... it didnt work too well for them then... cant see them trying again. I cant picture it being Avid or Discreet, as they both already have a vested interest in a direct competitor ( SoftImage and 3d Studios Max respectively ). I cant see it being any linux company as suggested before... it just is to far from the core business of any of them, to make any sense. Their isnt a linux company I can think of, with the money to buy Alias, that has a focus on multimedia.
In my mind, if its a big name company, that leaves just one company that it makes sense to be. Apple. Maya was recently ported to both Mac and Linux... apple is losing its luster as a media empire... and they have the money. I say if its a big name company behind the buyout, it makes the most sense to be Apple. I just pray they keep the wintel ports going, or I will be very pissed off.
For those of you that dont know, Maya is one sweet piece of software, and a shining example of how to pioneer a user interface.
I, for one, will welcome Alias' new overlords....
pussyfooting around the whole OSS issue How the hell is Maya "pussyfooting" around OSS? It isnt' OSS. MatLAB makes a linux version that you can only buy. B/c they are closed source and making software for linux means they are pussyfooting around something? Just b/c someone makes software for an OSS OS (gnu/linux) does not mean that they have to give their software out for free.
As someone who uses xsi professionally I can vouch for the sheer speed of the "subdivision surfaces" in xsi. However, it should be clarified that the subdees in xsi are polygons that are rounded with the either the catmull-clark, or the doo-sabin algorithms. Maya has both poly rounding and "real" heirarchial subdees, which are kinda neat. Unfortunately for maya, they're unbelieveably slow when interacting. In xsi I can take a 30k triangle base mesh and increase the subdiv count by 2 steps, which generates roughly 450k highres. Moving points around is quite quick, whereas the same mesh loaded up in maya is quite slow to interact with.
My patience is infinite, my time is not.
Not quite. If my memory serves, with Shake they kept the SGI and Linux versions and dumped the Windows version. They also halved the price of the MacOS X version, so you could get it and a "free" fully loaded G5 for less than the cost of a copy of the software alone for the other platforms.
I hope they do buy it. They've done amazing things with Final Cut Pro, and if they halved the price of Maya, I just might buy it even just to dabble with it.
D
see here
I think that with Apple's 64bit systems, they can give the likes of Sun and SGI a run for their money, hardware wise. StudioTools does run on windows x86, just not as well. Both Maya (then Power Animator) and StudioTools started life in IRIX, which is what made Maya such an easy port to OSX (i think it only took 2 months). Apple would love to enter the 3D workstation market and id love to see them, because StudioTools is the only program that i need to keep a wintel box around for.
there were rumors at the end of summer that Alias was working on a StudioTools port to OSX, but i havent heard anything since.
I want 2D games back.
about $0.38 per share. Almost took out a loan. Friend talked me out of it. Rose to nearly $4.00 a short while later..
I would be inclined to buy some anyway today. Bishop has a keen eye on SGIs core market:
Technical computing
IRIX is very good for this, MIPS is holding it back though. Their efforts on Linux will pay off, in my opinion. Linux is reaching the point where it will be possible to build an IRIX like system. Heck, you can today --it is only going to get easier.
SGI is one of the few companies to make a deal with Microsoft while still around to tell about it. (Legal won't, but many SGI folks will, if you catch them in the right mood.)
If that deal hadn't been the death of their 320 / 540 series machines, we would have great Linux technical workstations right now. I am not saying you cannot get a nice Linux workstation, but the SGI plan combined their engineering with custom Linux tweaks that would have made for nice boxes.
320/540 machines could support up to about 800Mb texture memory in a UMA design. Heavy texture models perform best in this configuration, because of the low latency bandwidth it provides to the graphics sub-system.
The Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph '99, I think. Microsoft and SGI had a little tiff shortly after that. Farenheit project --it seemed at the time, win32 was poised to take over that market since it had already made quite a dent. Gates knew about all the UNIX code that had to be rewritten. Direct X got good, thanks to SGI, but not good enough to justify all that work porting to a closed, hard to administer, expensive to cluster system with little ability to script or perform multi-user.
SGI legal scuttled the Linux drivers over win32 contract terms involving the ARC boot loader. It seems Microsoft has an interest in this that prevented SGI from providing machines with choices other than win32, or something like that. (Could never get the entire story.)
The series was canned. Generic PC machines running tweaked nVidia hardware replaced them to keep existing customers trying to leverage Linux happy. Their hardware had considerable advantages over the general purpose PC, so it only made sense for SGI to move away from the whole thing.
Today we see the Altix series machines along with high end SGI hardware on the desktop. The Altix, and high-end IRIX hardware is well positioned, while IRIX struggles at the workstation level. Linux is capturing applications far better than IRIX ever did.
(Which shows just how hard they got fucked over the Microsoft deal.)
Recovering from that and other blunders has taken a while. The new products are hitting their targets nicely. It is tough for them now, being late in the game. An SGI Linux workstation likely will not happen right away because of this. (We would have had them in '01, otherwise.)
SGI systems engineering is top notch, I hope they continue to improve and continue to develop their high bandwidth, single image designs. (They are the best, if you want a single OS image instead of a cluster.)
As for Alias, the organization beats to a different drum. The Maya side of things has been handled well. Can't say the same for their Studio product. Still high priced and no Linux --yet.
Maya is a hit in the entertainment business for obvious reasons. Their other product, Studio struggles in a niche status. Good for high end product design and styling, but poor at more mainstream applications. Traditional MCAD packages continue to consume many new potential Studio sales, while also chipping away at the established base of users.
I would not count the Linux version of Maya out. Alias knows better than that. There is no way the Studios are going to be pried back to win32. Going down that road proved expensive and problematic. Linux is the perfect fit. Alias would not be where they are today without having done that port.
OSS lets them (the studios) keep control of their tools an
Blogging because I can...
While Apple is a good bet, I'm thinking Adobe. Adobe has had a MAJOR gap when it comes to 3D, and they have been trying to fill it for ages. Last SIGGRAPH Adobe and Alias were hand in hand. I had quite a few AE friends from Alias that were in the Adobe booth performing demos.
As far as Alias goes, I used to sell Maya and Studio for 3 years. I have / had (layoffs) many friends that worked with and for Alias.
I'm really unsure how to classify this announcement. Doug Walker and James Christopher are probably (In my opinion) some of the worst people out there. It was a real shame to see these two take the helm as president and senior VP of customer support. I saw the attitude of the people go from "happy to come in" to "OMG I hate my job" once they moved in. After many Reseller and other private Alias events, I decided that these guys only cared about one thing, the bottom line. I knew this meant that the company was becoming just like the rest. Shortly before the price drop that I knew was coming, I left.
Also, keep in mind that when Maya 1.0 (with all the plug-ins, before unlimited) came out, it was around $100,000. The sales price of Maya dropped 93% over the past 5 years. Now that's AMAZING!
In summary, I think SGI is selling Alias because they know that it isn't going to keep making them money due to the drop in price. Also, I think that it's pretty clear that SGI either needs to get back to their core business or they are going to lose what little they have left.
Or... I'll go out on a limb here and say that ATI is going to purchase them.
Either way, this is going to be interesting.
will stay.
The big studios want it too much. Using Maya on OS X is as sweet, or sweeter than either win32 or Linux, but I think Linux will scale farther for back end tasks, at a lower cost, than OS X ever will.
Scaling is one of the top drivers for the big boys in this game. Linux has both win32 and OS X beat in the price / performance area cold.
Besides a lot of what the studios want is custom. SGI used to offer this under NDA, but it cost a lot. With Linux, they can do it far cheaper, on their time schedule, and share the bits that benefit everyone without having to repurchase and pay support on their own tech!
Blogging because I can...
At the time, Microsoft owned Softimage. Microsoft, having achieved their goal of moving 3D graphics onto Windows, sold off Softimage to Avid. Avid was the leader in 2D editing, but was starting to feel price pressure from below and was threatened by Softimage's move into that area. So they really bought Softimage to get the Softimage 2D editing package, and didn't really know what to do with the 3D product. Avid also had the problem that they were a high-end hardware vendor in a market where the high end was about to be eaten by the low end. As a result, the new Softimage 3D product, XSI, was years late.
So Maya took over. But it didn't help SGI sell expensive hardware. The low-end graphics boards were gaining on SGI. Maya was a software-only product, and didn't require SGI hardware. Maya is still available for Irix, but nobody buys SGI workstations to run it anymore. In fact, nobody buys SGI workstations for much of anything any more.
So it makes sense for SGI to sell off Maya. Of course, SGI doesn't have much of a core business left ("We're a graphics company! No, we're a workstation company! No, we're a server company! No, we're a Linux company!"). Their core business is selling expensive hardware, and that's not a good business to be in.
An Alias rep made a post regarding the sale on the Highend3D Buzz Board, second post down.
It looks like some of the Alias folks are working a deal where the investment firm will purchase the assets from SGI and then the Alias person(s) will then purchase those assets from the investment firm. The Alias folks break free of SGI and SGI gets some badly-needed cash.
I've since confirmed this via a party who Knows Things. So no black helicopters from Cuptertino or Redmond, you conspiracy theorists :)
Either way, they still have to figure out how to pay for R&D (or not) with a fully saturated market. We'll see.
Good high-end alternatives that are also available on Linux are Softimage XSI and Houdini. Both offer free evaluation/learning versions like Maya PLE, with the exception that they're available for Linux x86 too.
Another interesting commercial 3D suite available for Linux is Realsoft 3D, and it's a lot cheaper than Maya or the programs mentioned before.