From: Ponsonby Low
(Your history of [Metacreations] was chilling. Absolutely chilling. We know that few people pay attention to the lessons of history. It would be nice to think that the LL leadership is an exception to that rule, but...)
As a San Franciscan - I've been watching that kind of tale happen again, over and over and over again in fact - since the mid-90s.
Metacreations just springs to mind so well because they -were- THE company for amateur 3D enthusiasts in the 90s. Poser and Bryce were ways people on small budgets could get into 3D with easy to learn and use applications. And under their new owners today, they still are that - and in fact many animations in Second Life are made with Poser and the applications related to or competing with it, like Daz3D.
Plus that was the year I got into 3D, and I was one of the people who excitedly ordered my pre-order of Carrara, only to get the jaw-dropping news a few days after the box arrived that its entire dev team had already been laid-off...
And anyone with half a brain in 1999 could take even a one-eyed half-blind squinting in the dark peak at Pixar and come to the conclusion that there's a bright future for making 3D content, and being the company that is the 'starter lego set' for 3D artists is a golden place to be.
Kind of like Second Life.
- Its not a 'shiny' ... but the future is coming, and it will involve some sort of virtual reality, and Second Life today is the ground floor... Its not a 'Cyberpunk futuristic cyberspace' - but its kind of the one-celled sea critter that thing will conceptually evolve out of.
A slow steady nurturing of Second Life would give its company a place in history under 'how Cyberspace came about.' Which flips me to mentioning Daz3D again...
Daz3D competes with Poser today... the company that puts it out makes most of the models people use in both applications. They make a killing off of selling 'content' to users of both apps. They give out Daz3D for free (go download it from their website - daz3d.com , and you will have for free enough tools to make art, as well as make animations for SL). They claimed they made Daz3D because Poser was getting too complex and unwieldy... but... there's also a very likely reason that they did it for self protection as Poser kept having business troubles staying around after it was 'bought' by fans from the ruins of Metacreations...
If Second Life's LLs keep screwing around... somebody else... possibly even Blue Mars... (which I don't care for in its current incarnation)... is going to steal their place in history. Daz3D btw, is a more limited app than Poser, but has a sexier presentation to it... which might sound familiar as well...
- Tales like that are common in business out here in San Francisco / Silicon Valley...
Invariably when a bright bold idea gets handed off to a suit from outside... /fail ensues. Want to know why Apple and MS do so well... one reason among many might be that their visionaries didn't sell out, or (as for Apple) bought back in when they say how bad the suits were doing.
