Softimage was bought for a purpose and spun off later. It was bought by Microsoft to port Softimage|3D (and develop XSI) for NT platform - to show NT is as powerful for those applications as IRIX was. It was done, and it was sold later to AVID, now Softimage is part of Autodesk.
On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.
When I wrote a an XSI plugin for a feature film production, in 2005, for XSI running on Linux, half of the API was still using COM, it the app required a special gcc version that shipped with the sdk to compile plugins with and the Python was ActiveState Python (which clashed with the Linux system's Python).
In short, it was a disaster from a developers, and still a lot of trouble from a user's pov.
Now Adobe doesn't support Linux much but if what MS did to XSI is anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be a developer on one of those apps, after the acquisition.
I agree, Softimage was just mishandled. It was brought into Microsoft with a single task, and Sumatra(XSI) was architected at a really bad point in time for them. It was done on the verge of NT era, so they went berserk. Softimage (they have renamed XSI) is now a really solid piece of software, AGAIN mishandled by Autodesk. sigh.
MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.
Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.
I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.
> MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly.
It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.
They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.
The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.
Edit:
The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.
On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.