Maybe someone needs to come at this issue from a different angle.
1 - Technical knowhow is so widespread, new players can come from so many places and changes can occurr so rapidly in today’s world that building a stable monopoly and maintaining it over a long period of time is much more difficult than people think.
Owning Maya + 3DMAX + XSI doesn’t mean much when a new 3D software can be developed with relatively low capital investment in any country where there is a good pool of tech graduates. And there are many countries that have people capable of creating new 3D tools now.
2 - None of the 3D packages Autodesk owns are super-efficient “I imagined it and arrived at a reasonably high quality representation of my idea in 15 minutes” tools. The design thinking behind these tools is a decade old or older. Its difficult to make radical changes to the way they function without alienating the user bases trained on these tools.
A freshly developed software, no matter how primitive it starts out, faces none of these constraints. Workflow and user interface can be radically different. It may not use the standard splines, NURBS, polygons technology at all. Everything can be different, everything can be NEW. The resulting software may not resemble 3D packages designed in the 80s and 90s at all. Not in workflow and not even in the terminology used for its commands and functions.
It may be more efficient by a factor of 3 times or maybe 6 or 10 times on certain tasks because all the old thinking and assumptions about how stuff is done in 3D have been discarded and replaced with newer thinking and newer ideas.
3 - The era of “play it safe, create N number of sequels, recycle as many concepts and ideas as you can, throw 150 specialized people and lots of money at each creative project” is over. It takes a high flying global economy to feed such “creativity factories” and “uncreativity factories” and sell repetitive crap to consumers who have a lot of free time and money to spend.
That high flying global economy was built on HOT AIR and HUBRIS. And no amount of “maybe governments will fix it with xyz intervention package” can or will fix that.
In the next 5 years consumers will spend less, investors will invest less, banks will give less credit and there will be a lot more hard questions asked before any expensive creative projects that use 3D or CG are financed.
It will be harder to sell unsattisfying films to moviegoers. Harder to flog a 5th sequel to a tired game franchise. Harder to justify intrusive DRM and copy protection schemes to a consumer who already feels guilt at having spent so liberally on hardware and games during the “boom years”.
The playing field will change. And it will change heavily in favor of individuals and small teams of creatives who can DO A LOT WITH A LITTLE, have the guts to create something truly original and don’t try to serve consumers soup in a can as a gourmet meal.
To do a lot with a little you need a) good ideas, b) the ability to create something good semi-spontaneously without months of advance planning and c) quick, unproblematic tools that really don’t get in your way.
Now the question is how many of Autodesk’s big, expensive tools are compatible with this landscape?
It doesn’t matter much that you have the best $1.5m piece of construction equipment in your catalogue when people doing the actual constructing want a smaller machine that costs only $150,000 and can turn in a smaller space and be parked under a standard height roof.
It doesn’t matter that the car you make can reach 0 - 100km/h in 3 secs when people are looking for something fuel efficient that just “gets them from A to B without breaking the bank”.
It doesn’t matter that you try to get an iron grip on a file standard when a new one can be constructed from scratch in a matter of month by people in different parts of the world who’ve never even met face to face.
I’m sorry for XSI users who have lost their “independence”. Its tragic that people who don’t want to be AD customers now have to be AD customers.
But this is hardly the end of competition in 3D.
In fact you could argue that the lousy global economy will give everyone from Intel to Nvidia to Microsoft a good kick in the pants and any innovation that was surpressed in the last few years or kept on a shelf for “bad times” (UIs, CPU technology, GPU technology, new coding tools) will have to be brought to market much faster and at a lower price than before.
If any of these companies have a piece of super hardware or software (like a truly nextgen GPU or a new code compiler) on the shelf that they were planning to withhold until 2010-11 they will have to bring it to market TOMORROW to keep their sales from going in the toilet.
That includes Autodesk as well, btw. Things are going to get slow in construction, engineering, archviz, manufacturing and a lot of other sectors that use CADCAM and 3D visualization tools. Nobody is going to beg Autodesk during this period to please sell them “another update”.
People who see companies like Autodesk as “invulnerable giants that buy everything in their path” may be in for a rude surprise. The tools these companies sell sell only when there is a lot of economic activity that requires these tools to be used and a lot of people who are employed on the basis of being able to use these tools to create economic produce. Games. TV ads. Print ads. Films. Engineering and product designs.
When that activity slows to a crawl, so do tool sales for even the biggest tool vendors. Adobe. Autodesk. Microsoft. You name it.
Bad economic times cause some players to cut down on activity or withdraw from markets completely.
And they spur some people and corporate players to exploit the shaken up landscape.
If someone with deep pockets has been thinking about entering the 3D or CAD fray for a long time, this may be the precise time they do it.
It helps that an economic crisis causes people to rethink everything. The way they work. The output they create. The tools they use. Their loyalty to a particular provider of tools and so forth.
Interesting times may be ahead. Even if companies like Autodesk and Electronic Arts look like they are swallowing everything and everyone, it takes a lot of money and really good sales to finance all those divisions and aquisitions. When all economic activity slows… well…
//end_of_rant
