I think Steve Jobs looked at some invoice and said "Shake? What's this crap? Cancel it."
Apple bought Shake back in 2002. At that time, Jobs was still eyeball deep in time slicing between being CEO of Pixar and Apple at the same time. Apple went on a run of buying stuff associated with Hollywood. That all smelled much more of Jobs' hand than something that sneaked in under his radar since he was spending "half" of his time bopping around Hollywood business circles.
I'd guess that Apple wanted Shake on the Mac OS X platform. When porting porting proved to be more expensive than Nothing Real could (or wanted to ) shoulder could have led to discussions for Apple to invest to get it ported. When Apple found out they could buy NR for a relatively low amount they did.
So easily, Apple bought it because they could and it was "cheap". Neither one of those is a solid foundation for a long term commitment to the product.
I also wonder what Apple thought their pro customers would think about their decision to take a program that was basically an industry standard, require you to buy a mac to use it
Industry standard?
A post here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-741312.html
pegged NR's user base at 2,500. Apple then went on to grow that to 30-40K. Given the associated post acquisition price drops (and likely increase in academic copies sold) that seems reasonable. High prices tends to shrink the user base.
At 2,500 and 10K price it would be shocking if Apple paid more than $25M for NR. At 30K and $5K they would more than made their money back. So shutting it down, if continued development painful, is a no brainer .
Apple apparently tried to use the software as a wedge ( buying a Mac OS X software + hardware system was lower than buying just the software for Linux). Being a tool being used to achieve an end, it should be evident there isn't a deep commitment to the software in and of itself. If Apple has taken to selling appliances ( a "box" that just did compositing) that would have been more aligned with the program's primary function.
Long term though Apple needed to integrate the pro video stuff into a suite. If being used as a wedge and off platform initial heritage that doesn't particularly lend itself to merging into a suite. Once at the "but will totally rewrite from ground up to integrate" stage, you might as well just take the low hanging fruit and just merge it. (e.g., take very basic compositing and put it into the suite ).
Are people actually buying those all in one gateways and HP touchsmart PCs? God have mercy.
I should have said All-in-ones/laptops. Technically laptops are in same boat of not being "box with slots and attached monitor" category. Between the laptop and merge computer to monitor models the others are in decline. The vast majority of users need a complete system that just works. Has nothing to do with touchscreens. Has much more to do with computers becoming smaller ( fewer and fewer chips and components needed to implement one.) and the core needs of the users.
There is a smaller set of folks who do require more flexibility. They are not the mainstream. Actually never were the mainstream even if the legacy mainstream "modular box" suggested they were. That doesn't mean Apple is ignoring the market. Just assigning the relatively weighting it actually has.
Mac Pros and XServes are likely to drift into a 12-16 month refresh cycle over time. That's no slower than Moore's Law and if the "ultimate flexible" boxes drift toward packing as many transistors as possible into the box.... can't really go any faster than Moore's Law.
If there is a failure here in Apple's policy toward the Pro market, it is a failure to announce retirements/EOL around the same time that Apple internally makes the decision. If the Mac Pro has been "steved" then announce it. Not the notion of pre-announcing; that isn't as important.
