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.
While it seems ridiculous in light of the more recent pricing, the big price drop for Maya was around 1999, when it dropped from $10,000 a module to $2000. It has/had five modules for a total of $50,000 for one seat of the full Maya software. Support contracts were around $4000 a year. When it dropped to a grand total of $10K for the whole deal, we thought the world had come to an end. I know people who paid the $50,000. Now it's $7000. Oi.
I do find it funny that everyone starts assuming that Apple is behind the sale of Alias. If you look at the past, Apple has typically only bought applications when there was no other chance of a port. Maya's been running on OSX for a while now (not with full parity to the Windows version, but hey).
Also, there is a very limited business case for buying Alias. When they dropped the price of Maya to $2K, they sold it to everyone who hadn't bought it at the previous price points. The market is COMPLETELY saturated. Just about every VFX shop has numerous Maya seats at this point. Game studios kept it afloat a while longer, but Softimage XSI is finally starting to edge it out in that market. Alias was even dumping licenses for free to compete with Softimage. With revenue just about tapped out, R&D is slowing ( a la Maya 5). The only viable financial future I see would be for Alias to refocus on Studio, which is still very popular in industrial design. There just ain't any money in making "high end" 3D (or 2D) tools anymore. Ford almost bought Alias a few years ago for ~$175M, if I remember correctly. I doubt it will go for nearly that much, now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on Softimage. Avid is notorious for shafting their own products, so we'll see what they do to Soft.
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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.
While it seems ridiculous in light of the more recent pricing, the big price drop for Maya was around 1999, when it dropped from $10,000 a module to $2000. It has/had five modules for a total of $50,000 for one seat of the full Maya software. Support contracts were around $4000 a year. When it dropped to a grand total of $10K for the whole deal, we thought the world had come to an end. I know people who paid the $50,000. Now it's $7000. Oi.
I do find it funny that everyone starts assuming that Apple is behind the sale of Alias. If you look at the past, Apple has typically only bought applications when there was no other chance of a port. Maya's been running on OSX for a while now (not with full parity to the Windows version, but hey).
Also, there is a very limited business case for buying Alias. When they dropped the price of Maya to $2K, they sold it to everyone who hadn't bought it at the previous price points. The market is COMPLETELY saturated. Just about every VFX shop has numerous Maya seats at this point. Game studios kept it afloat a while longer, but Softimage XSI is finally starting to edge it out in that market. Alias was even dumping licenses for free to compete with Softimage. With revenue just about tapped out, R&D is slowing ( a la Maya 5). The only viable financial future I see would be for Alias to refocus on Studio, which is still very popular in industrial design. There just ain't any money in making "high end" 3D (or 2D) tools anymore. Ford almost bought Alias a few years ago for ~$175M, if I remember correctly. I doubt it will go for nearly that much, now.
It'll be interesting to see what effect this has on Softimage. Avid is notorious for shafting their own products, so we'll see what they do to Soft.