Re- Softimage and Autodesk: Sure they'd love this market, just for the sheer size of the market (FYI Ray Dream's products sold more than 150,000 _registered_ units, and at its peak reached the 10,000 units sold/month. To put this in perspective, 2 yrs ago Autodesk claimed an installed base ww of 70,000 users, growing at 2-3,000 units a month; As for Softimage, Alias & co the total market is less than 40,000 seats and I don'tbelieve any of them sells more than 15,000 units/yr). As everyone, especially MSFT knows, there are real benefits to having dominant market share, even if at the "low-end" of the scale. To top it off, apps like the upcoming RD Studio 5 aren't exactly low-end anymore feature-wise.
Re- MSFT interest, I don't think they'd do any acquisition of this scope just for the sake of a single (or even two) technologies like RTG, and acquisitions of established companies is not exactly their style of operations (with the notable exception indeed of Softimage). So I would not hold my breath on this one.
Eric - now gone for the week-end (May 8th is a holiday in France, like May 1 and May 17th. yeah, I know... ;-)). |
