CompuServe Messages

Gary, Remember though, "May you live in interesting times." is an ancient chinese *CURSE*. I agree about the chaos — look what happened to Softimage after Microsoft bought them out, new releases of pre-announced product were seriously set back. Soon as I heard this on the radio I jumped on to the forum to say something, but sure enough, you beat my scoop by an hour and a half Gary ! Wavefront needs this for the sales, marketing and support side of the biz — Dynamation and Kinemation have breathed new life into thier sales overall, they've been runnning ads for months, looking for product managers, marketing pros, and tech support people. I figure Alias brings thier modeling technology to the table. Good or bad for the industry ? I think LESS competitiion, is BAD ! Less product competition means less creative innovation, and more resistance to price competition. In the short run, this is good for YOST/ADESK, I agree, now it's even more unlikely that we'll ever see the leader's, (and 3DS competition) Wavefront, products running on a future Intel chip or like you said, Microsoft OS. Of course, Alias has already been in both the PC and Mac markets with less than full featured products. As memory serves, a few years ago, they even flirted with GSL/Crystal Topas for a while, advertising that you could import Topas models into Alias animator. In the long run though, I've always seen the SGI trend to be toward spreading thier technology down to "our level". The Indigo, the Indy, the deal with Nintendo, the Sony Playstation, the Keystone initiative, all point to SGI technology creep eventually establishing a defacto new graphics PC beachead through the backdoor. Interesting SIGGRAPH indeed ! Bruce N. Goren