RE: What's it worth?

["Knut A. Helgeland" <knut(at)toxic.no>]

At 13:59 -0600 18-11-05, Judy Ranelli wrote:
> I am curious as to how many of you on here were ever on Media 
> Illusion.  We had one prior to DS.  I am not familiar with the story 
> of its demise from the Avid line-up. 

I trained on the Illusion for a short while. It was very capable, but 
also too expensive, underdeveloped and separated from any consistent 
workflow.

Avid has a long history of regarding the high end market as 
unprofitable. One high up product manager once told me plainly that 
Avid would never relaunch any of their high end tools, nor launch any 
new tool for a high end market, because they would never make any 
money on it. When asked directly about Illusion, Matador and Elastic 
Reality, he simply said "good riddance".

I believe that the majority of present and former Avid managers 
consider Softimage their huge mistake. They have failed over and over 
in trying to squeeze it into their own product lineup, while ignoring 
the needs and demands of the high end market and the potential of the 
DS architecture. The fact that DS is alive at all comes down to the 
loyalty of the user base and the ingenuity of the Softimage team in 
maneuvering within the constant internal policy struggles of the Avid 
system.

The Nitris bob was always an Avid box, developed alongside the 
Adrenaline in Tewksbury as a continuation of the Meridien. We got it 
on DS first because Softimage convinced the Tewks team that they 
could make it work first, but it was never meant to be a DS-only bob; 
it wasn't even designed with DS specifically in mind.

DS is now a stepchild in limbo in the Avid system, lost somewhere 
between Tewksbury and Canada. Avid is focusing on Symphony and making 
plans for all the Pinnacle employees, Softimage is concentrating all 
efforts on their core product XSI in the fight against the mighty 
opposition of Alias Autodesk. Getting DS out of limbo will take a 
formidable amount of diplomacy and good will between Siftimage and 
Avid; I have no faith at all in this happening anytime soon.

Illusion, Matador and Elastic Reality was never shelved at any 
specific time, they just stopped developing until the products became 
irrelevant. We are free to draw our own conclusions.

K
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Knut A. Helgeland
Toxic Design Studio
http://www.toxic.no
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