by Don Burnett
Autodesk 3D Launch Tour Chicago
"..I knew Jack Kennedy... and you are no Jack Kennedy.."
Wow things are really cooking in Chicago lately. I went to Autodesk's 3D Tour. I was there for more than one reason as I am helping a local community organization open a studio. The last Alias Maya informational thing I attended was their "3December" event. Well I would just tell you the Autodesk demo was no "3December".. What's wrong with the presentation? I don't really want to say it was a bad presentation, it was held in the beautiful Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. People were amazingly polite and nice and everything was well ordered. It's obvious that even though 3dsMax is being re-positioned to fit in with Maya marketing at Autodesk, Maya is still taking a "backseat" and narrow marketing scope seems to be taking place unfortunately. People do use Maya outside of Hollywood you know but Autodesk seems to not see this as a "marketable strategy" for them.
Issues I had with the demonstration..
1) First presentation: if you were new to Autodesk 3ds Max you couldn't follow the presentation. They went over the "new" features as if the audience had been using the product for the last six years. The new advertising material isn't positioning 3dsMax as a program you can use for design and architectural visualization and no longer a broadcast competitor to Maya for video and broadcast animation. They also billed 3dsMax as tool for game development in a separate presentation. This new repositioning is very interesting and a very positive move to keep the product alive. It moves 3dsMax into their core CAD visualization business taking it's place next to AutoCAD..
I don't really care for presentations that go feature-for-feature and miss the key points of the new features, while the presentation gets stuck in detail points about features that can be done now four or five ways differently than last year. This was my major problem with this presentation it did all of those things. I got lost in the info and kept having to ask myself what was the main point again.. After about 35 minutes into it the audience was ready to "snooze". This is stuff that none of the audience cared about, even if you did use 3dsMax, you are going to figure all that stuff our for yourself while working with the new version.
If you didn't look already do "3dsMax" you didn't learn how to do anything with it, and you were lost in the details of the presentation. This set the tone for the rest of the evening.
2) The registration system was flawed. I signed up for all three initial sessions or thought I had, and when I got there I was asked which sessions I was attending and they only had me setup for the first session. I asked for the first two sessions and was given information packets just for the first two (although I would have liked to got information about their broadcast tools). It turns out that the packets (I was given the first two). Seemed to be the same information so I have two copies of their same brochures.. I was hoping for something different I guess.
3) I guess I had hoped for more "Maya" info and information on their broadcast products, Maya was relegated to the last presentation of the Evening towards their broadcast products. It was obvious that they feel stronger about marketing their core products over Maya which was receiving very little love from the 3dsMax folks. Autodesk you "OWN MAYA", you need to embrace it or "kill it". I hope you embrace it, because you now "OWN" the market. The presentations really don't indicate you folks have any of the vision and market savvy that Alias did. It's just disappointing to see.
4) I was hoping for more company presence to ask questions and talk to. The presentations were basically like going into a theater and seeing a movie. I wanted to walk out of the first presentation and ask business questions about purchase and I had no one to do that with. The guy basically said he was "in the back during the presentation" and he was to far away from me to identify and I could not find him later even to talk to. Nvidia and Intel also were "sponsors" but they were no where to be found.
5) Timing of this was bad, it was set for 3-9:30 at 5 there was supposed to be a "break" but the presenter kept talking, when we did go outside we found food that I couldn't even eat due to my dietary restriction (luckily this was Chicago so the Cheesecake Factory and their awesome food was a block down the street.
If I had to compare this to 3December and the Alias events I'd say that I felt sorry for the Maya product team, as I felt the Autodesk wasn't as well put together, and it was like 3 separate presentations, back-to-back with not as much of a break out as I had hope for. The people during the presentations seemed like they were "preaching to the choir" and like it was something they had to do and they were servicing customers they "already had"..
Adobe Max 2007
It's coming to Chicago September 30th through October 3rd. This is the big Adobe development conference, if you don't know about it, you probably should.
Reasons to go:
- Unique opportunities to connect with thousands of peers
- Sneak peeks at emerging technologies
- Over 200 sessions organized into five tracks
- Training on Adobe products, services, and solutions
- One-on-one interaction with Adobe certified experts
- Hands-on access to Adobe products
- Special networking events
Most of the people who read this blog do WPF and Silverlight applications and probably came from development in Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, so keeping up with that market is pretty important to your business as well.
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