Quote - Just look at Softimage the other day.

I completely missed that. Autodesk now have Maya and XSI!? I feel sick.

When Adobe acquired Macromedia it dumped Freehand in favour of it own inferior Illustrator, slowed innovation and raised prices. There are a lot of unhappy people out there. There's also no real competition. Graphics wise, Corel are a shadow of their formers selves so PhotoShop's safe and Microsoft's Expression Web is two versions away from challenging DreamWeaver as it is now.

Is Autodesk the Adobe of the 3D world? Rationalistion of its product line cannot be more than a year away. The costs of maintaining software with overlapping functionality must be unbearable in the long term especially given the current economic climate.

If, and it is an if, Autodesk acquire E-On what happens to the non-professional offerings? Goodbye Pioneer, Esprit, Pro and Complete?

I'd love to see Cinema 4D, Poser and Vue all under one ownership. Now that's a combination that could at least begin to challenge AutoDesk. Having SketchUp and zBrush in the mix would be nice but that's a little too unrealistic. :-)

There's nothing us mere customers can do but watch what happens.

Cheers,
Mark