Mathon, so glad to see your signature...
Gary Laur landed in a great place for someone like himself to wind up. like his fellow SGI graduate Rob Burgess, he has a good perspective about what the combo of very powerful, consumer priced multiemedia software and very powerful consumer priced hardware add up to in a good business model. guys like this who had lots of exposure to the real desires and needs of high end graphics pros, yet retain the business mindset are worth betting on IMHO.
MCRE has a very nice integrated spread of products IMO, and the strong potential to take 3D to the masses with products like Poser that simplify character animation through libraries of character poses and models.
the cabal that is forming of exSGI folk whove moved into the Mac/PC multimedia utility market is the one that will do very well selling things that were exotic and very expensive until recently. unfortunatly, the software i use is comprehensable only to the very small cult of film and game priesthood. and at $30K per seat it won't get a much bigger audience. a year after the release of Maya, A/W still hasn't been able to send out any examples or the tutorials that were promised back then, maybe no one inside A/W knows how to use it:)
meanwhile, MCRE's stuff will show up everywhere, novices by the millions will buy it for a single job, even if they don't follow through.
all the interfaces are fun (even silly) but this seems to ease the fear factor of the unwashed.
and i think mr Laur is tuning his model wisely, selling off the plugin stuff and concentrating on developing a distinctive market.
companies like this will benefit the most from the increased power and capability of new hardware.
so yeah, i like him there.
regards,
vincent |
