When Jonah was swallowed by the whale, what happened to his customers?
And what about his competitors? The whale’s competitors? What about all
that stuff they both made?
With Autodesk’s October 4 announcement of a "definitive agreement" to
acquire Alias for $182 million in cash, the industry is already gazing
into the eye of a 3D leviathan, trying to figure out its intentions.
Autodesk, the world’s leading design and collaboration software
company, with reported revenue of over 1.2 billion last year, now adds
Alias’ Maya, MotionBuilder and FBX software to its current 3D authoring
toolset, which includes Autodesk VIZ and 3ds Max. While Softimage, its
prime remaining competitor, has declined to comment at this time, one
can guess the Avid division is in a bit of a spin.
Most customers, however, seem warily optimistic about what the merger
will mean. According to Alex Lindsay, chief architect and founder of
Pixel Corps (and Studio/monthly "How" contributor),
the applications "are due for an overhaul." "The most likely outcome,"
he says, "is to just improve integration in the short term and put
money into a new application that has the interactivity of
MotionBuilder, the extensibility of Maya and game tools from Max."
Likewise, Torsten Reil, CEO and co-founder of NaturalMotion, sees both
parties’ product lines, specifically Maya and Max, continuing into the
foreseeable future, and hopes to also see a boost for FBX as an
industry standard. "Autodesk and Alias have the opportunity to pool
their R&D resources (financial and talent) and take their time to
create a successor to Max and Maya," says Reil. "Ironically, the lack
of competition between them might result in more innovation in the long
term."
Brad Peebler, president and co-founder of Luxology (and former NewTek
LightWave executive), says "this deal is not about Max/Maya but rather
CAD (Autocad/Studio). Autodesk has a lot more to gain by leveraging
Alias Studio tools into the CAD market than they do in the
entertainment space," he says. "If Autodesk treats Maya as they have
Max, this would be incredibly negative for the Maya product….
However, if Autodesk plays this right and leverages the work Alias has
done secretly over the past few years to connect the CAD pipeline to
Maya, this convergence could be a huge win for the market in general."