KeeWe wrote:
I'm with you about disrespectful behaviour, a 100%. The problem with Otoy though: they are teasing and promising stuff which are considered by customers when deciding to buy their product. I work with octance since v2 and when I hear/see things about "a great feature" which is supposed to come with the next update, I tend to stick with it and am not looking somewhere else. And that's pretty manipulative...
Otoy should just release stuff when it's ready. Tangling the carrot right in front of your face and never let you taste it or relase only a lite version of it just sucks.
It's a hard lesson to learn, but I've been working in this industry since the mid 90s. This kind of hype has always been the case. These developers are competing with each other on the cutting edge of technology. Teasing what is coming, or to be more accurate, what the developers sincerely hope/think is very likely to be coming to the users, and the marketing dept runs with it, is one of the best ways to hype your product and move units. Everybody does it.
All the way back to Infini-D/Swivel3D/Electric Image/Lightwave/TrueSpace/3D Studio/Renderman/Amiga Reflections/C4D to Power Animator/Alias/Animation Master/Realsoft/Maya/Stdio Max/Blender/Rino/Form*Z/Maxwell/Arnold/Redshift/Cycles/Modo/Mudbox/Solidworks/Unreal/Unity etc. And that's just the 3D stuff, not to mention all the 2D editing/FX/compositing tools. If you've ever been to NAB or SIGGRAPH, they all show of the latest demo reels along with flashy "upcoming" features that may or may not see the light of day.
Perhaps I'm just old and jaded, but until feature X is actually shipping in a reasonably stable form, I act like it never will. Try not to base purchasing decisions based on any features that may or may not be available "soon." Will the tool help you do your job now, in its current form? Can you justify the capital outlay if there will never been an update to the shipping product? If so, great, buy it! If not, don't bite.
Sometimes we are forced to make purchase decisions we regret. I feel awful for people who bought the last of the Intel Mac Pros expecting them to be Octane powerhouses for the next five or six years, and decent workstations for at least ten, but I also understand the vicissitudes of interdependent technologies and corporate strategies. Sometimes they mesh beautifully, sometimes they don't. I'm pretty sure Otoy expected to support AMD video cards on Mac OS for years to come. Well, those were bad bets on both Otoy's and Mac buyer's parts, but that's capitalism for you. Everything changes fast. In a few more years, I suspect the idea of worrying about what GPU is on a local desktop workstation will be essentially obsolete. I would hate to be a media production tool corporate strategist trying to navigate these changes, hoping to remain profitable while scrambling like mad to keep up with the competition so that they don't suddenly become irrelevant without enough time to pivot.
It's been a crazy, exciting, exhausting, thrilling ride, but part of me is glad that I'll be retiring to my wood/machine shop in a few years, where the basic tools and skills haven't changed much in at least 100 years, in some cases several thousand.
... and you kids, get off my lawn!
