Lots of People wrote:lots of angry stuff
Hey guys, just reiterating Bepe's comment and adding some perspective;
Have a look around: all the bigger software companies have a big marketing and PR/Communication divisions who just pump out the company line and un-technical marketing fluff. Different model, different customer input strategy (until recently perhaps), different income stream, different.
The smaller companies have staff responding on forums; Otoy, Mcneel et al. to varying levels of maturity.
Mcneel have; after missing several deadlines now begun enforcing a 'no deadline' policy. They flat out wont comment on dates: the systems they work within are all too complex, and rely on too many external parties work which is completely outside their control (and they burned themselves giving out dates).
This is one of the more obvious differences between a Visualisation/perspective art studio who's raw output is the product of internal resources only and a software company who have diverse products which interact with such broad range of externally constructed, consistently fluxing (updates, driver changes) resources within the system (Computer).
As an example: In our studio if we have a consultant (visualisation/perspective artist) who isn't delivering drafts and we are concerned they'll miss the deadline we talk to them, if they tell us they cant make it; fine, we goto someone else for that project. If they were our preferred; so we'd still go back, but they do not have any 'unique' input which has no equivalent/comparable.
Compare this to Otoy who need to use layers of Microsoft stuff, layers of Nvidia stuff, Layers of Apple stuff and a whole bunch of internal multi-team member, multi specialty input and stitch it all together into something that FUNCTIONS.
I understand there is an ultra-top end VFX market, where project teams of 10+ work for 6 months+ on the same project; but its the exception amongst the peers on this forum.
Software companies (of the scale of Otoy) have project team of several (10+?) internal programmers with unique specialisations, several external contributors/infrastructure to work within and they are building something with multi-faceted functions - interactive beyond the scope of the most interactive VFX project.
If someone has a good academic argument why Visualisation/perspective art production has anything more than passing relationship/parallel with a software company production I'd be interested to hear it...
EDIT: used VFX a bit naïvely, revised to visualisation/perspective art