Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.
Adobe is their Microsoft.
I was surprised not so long back to find out just how much of the proprietary 3D market that Autodesk held. It seems like they own pretty much all of the big, studio-oriented 3D packages I had heard of from 10-15 years ago.
> Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.
Autodesk’s reach in the niche of M&E 3D packages seems far more horizontal than Oracle’s in even databases. It is as though they set out to own all of the competition and largely succeeded – and this isn’t even the area that brings in most of their revenue.
Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.
Autodesk does an equally poor job maintaining their Architecture and Engineering softwares, despite them being a larger market. GP’s comments about the state of Maya hold true for AutoCAD and Revit as well.
For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue.
I wonder if the market is that small.
The resources that get poured into Blender are coming out of pure desperation. The companies that pay for it have to have some tool that is suitable for their work and supporting Blender is simply cheaper than doing it from scratch.
I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than development, one where M&E is less than 10% of their company revenue[0] (those numbers, which are an increase in revenue, can likely be attributed to the forcing of subscriptions), and having to cover a lot of ground re-architecting an application with a ton of technical and legacy debt. The historical idea of Maya being a Fraken-app exists for a reason.
[0] https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c...