Re: Not bad
Originally posted by agreenster
Glad to see someone not say that Apple runs the movie studios--it is an SGI world out there. Its also no suprise that Steve's other company, Pixar, is ALL SGI and Unix (and the occasional IBM Workstation for Maya-they use proprietary software for animation -all in Unix- though).
The interesting thing here is, SGI has been on the ropes for a few years now. Most of their graphics brain trust left and went to... NVIDIA. So NVIDIA has been producing some kick-ass 3D technology, but not the computer system to wrap around it. Now here's Steve, who runs both a Hollywood graphics company
and a computer company, but his graphics guys don't use his computers. That's got to itch a little.
This same Steve, as it turns out, also once ran a UNIX workstation company, which failed, but arguably because it was too far ahead of its time. Regardless, Steve's present computer company owns the assets of the workstation company, and has used those assets to produce possibly the best operating system ever unleashed on the public.
At the same time, NVIDIA has just turned out an un-be-freaking-lievable new graphics chip, and Apple has cozied up so close to NVIDIA that their products actually show up in Macs before they do in PCs.
Not only that, but Steve somehow managed to talk Alias|Wavefront into becoming an "early adopter" of Mac OS X, and to port their expensive and popular professional 3D software to the platform. Many pundits have suggested that the Maya/OS X project is doomed because Hollywood folks aren't using Macs. I think maybe they've missed the point. Especially now that we see Steve seems to have snapped up a whole company dedicated to professional Hollywood graphics software, which heretofore produced their software for Irix and Wintel only.
With SGI's prolonged stumbling, and Intergraph completely defunct with regard to hardware, there's an enormous vacuum in the industry, with an almost unimaginable amount of revenue just waiting for the right company to come along and offer a complete solution. The only piece of the puzzle missing here is the G5. Many people have complained bitterly about the seeming delays in getting G5s out, but it could be that Steve is biding his time, getting all the pieces in place, and staging a major coup in the high-end professional market. MWNY would be a fantastic place to announce such a beast, since the NY crowd has a higher media industry skew than even San Francisco. I can't guarantee Steve's going to DO this astonishing thing, but he's certainly positioned himself well for it.
<MrBurns>Eeeeeexcellent</MrBurns>
