What is Microsoft's track record for spinning off companies?
The Photoshop/CS part of Adobe is somewhat profitable, correct? Would MS let it go (even for a bucket of cash)?
The Photoshop/CS part of Adobe is somewhat profitable, correct? Would MS let it go (even for a bucket of cash)?
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a successful spin off though as Microsoft bought them when they were, IMHO, at their peak.
Confirmation of what? you don't specify:)
I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.