Rumors of Apple making a big acquisition

[MatthewJCollins]

@Bluster T Hogwash

Ummm. Macs come with BootCamp to load Windows onto them. How does that square with this rant?

BTH

It was a generalized statement. I didn’t intend for it to be taken too literally. I just believe that Jobs has shown a desire to have tight control over everything (it’s Apple’s business model), and to me that contradicts Unity’s open platform philosophy. So I fear that if Apple got their hands on it, Unity’s fundamental philosophy would change in a way that would no longer be inclusive for PC users. IMO it would ruin what Unity is really all about. That’s what I worry about.

BTW, I would feel just as strongly against MS buying out UT. I think both of those companies would ruin Unity if they got their hands on it.

@""

Caligary went to hell before MS bought them.
It always had some significant weeknesses, but over time they combined it with not reasonably getting better with new major and .x releases, having their users run away left and right.

GameSpace has shown that rather well … one release and no reasonable support beyond that point (a tool like this requires 2-4 updates per year to remain viable and leads that keep an eye on the field which they totally failed to do), a total deathbirth approach to attack Autodesks outdated max spinoff Gmax or how it was called

MS just had the guts to realize that it sux and that the investments required to get it onto a competitive level is that far out of scale that it would take half a decade at least to make it back into the greens in the light of Maxons C4D, Autodesks tools (3DS Max, Maya, XSI) and Houdini but not at last due to blender.

If MS hadn’t bought it, it likely would have gone through much uglier trouble including being bought by someone who would have voided its existance instead of making it free.

Unity is not remotely in this situation (if an engine maker would be, it would be GarageGames but they lost the battle long ago and were sold out to InstantAction)

I never meant to compare Unity to trueSpace, except for the idea that Apple would likely ruin Unity similar to how I feel MS ruined trueSpace.

I agree that Caligari made a poor decision with the “split” architecture, and that’s when a lot of users walked away. When they started building the new architecture from the ground up, they tacked the old trueSpace onto it, basically as a big plug-in. The old architecture was bloated and breaking at the seams, so they needed to start over, but that decision to combine them really wrecked everything and upset a lot of users.

However, they were starting to do some interesting things with the new architecture. It still had a couple of years of work left before it could stand on it’s own, but there were a couple of brilliant developers implementing some solid tools. They had some novel ideas going too, like online collaborative authoring environments. I don’t know that it would have competed with some of the other bigger apps, but I think it would have been competitive within its price range.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. When MS bought out Caligari, everything went dead silent and development came to a grinding halt. Then MS gave it away for free, started stripping out features (like Vray), then said they weren’t making enough money from it and dropped it. Well duh! You gave it away for free!

I was pretty close with the Caligari team and saw behind the scenes what MS did. In my eyes, they certainly did ruin trueSpace, just as the new architecture was coming close to holding it’s own. I know trueSpace has always had a bad reputation amongst “serious” 3d artists, but I saw and liked what they were doing with the new architecture, and was disappointed when MS came in and threw it all away for nothing. I’m sure they got what they wanted though.

So I would just hate to see a big corporation like MS or Apple buy out UT and ruin another product/company that I love. Do you really think UT/Unity would stay the same under Apple’s control? Sure they would try to stay the same at first, but there would inevitably be a gag order and we soon wouldn’t be talking so openly with the UT folks we’ve come to call friends. UT would get absorbed into the big empty hallways of another monster corporation and be digested into what the monster wants it to be. I don’t think it would be pretty.

Forgive my cynicism, I’ve just seen this happen and it’s unnerving, especially when you’re fond of the product/company in question.

[ZigZarc]

It turns out the guy who made the original Sony statement was just guessing. He was just saying something along the lines of he believes Apple are looking at a major acquisition, something like Sony.

Even wilder conjecture: Apple are game changers. They like to bring out new products that disrupt the existing market. Transport is in a state of flux as various approaches are developing to lessen the reliance on fossil fuels and the CO2 it creates. Perhaps we will be seeing the Apple car, jet pack, personal mobility device or something similar as a result of acquisition.

I don’t believe it either, too far from their knowledge and skills base, although there was speculation that Apple could be one of the non-car companies looking at the Gordon Murray iStream car manufacturing process and the T25 car designed to show off the process.