I received this email from Ton in response to my email. In my email, I expressed that many of the members the Blender Community felt they could help NAN by paying a “annual nominal fee” .
While reading his response, think back to the days of the C-key.
Hi Tim,
We are all pretty good aware of the positive support from the user community, and the opportunity to get their financial support as well.
On the other hand, we have to be careful and not be too optimistic on this… a company of the NaN size (25 persons) never could have survived with the community only. That’s possible when we slim down to 4 people or
so, which currently still is not an option (who will do it?).
We are seriously looking for alternatives, but these have to be very very realistic. Best is still, to find a company with a proven track of record in the 3D media field.
But why sell a product to a company already established in the 3D field?
…and further, does anyone speculate that either Adobe or Macromedia could pick this gem up, particularly since either company is not well-established in the 3D field? (I don’t look forward to it, of course, but imho this is a very promising product, and Macromedia and Adobe have been known to buy out products from other companies (e.g. Futuresplash = Flash, GoLive Cyberstudio = GoLive, Aldus Illustrator, Allaire Coldfusion = Macromedia Coldfusion, etc.)…
i’d love to see macromedia pick it up. they have a uniform interface kit for all of their apps and many web designers could pick up blender pretty fast.
The words “3d media field” are a little concerning. Does this mean that Ton is wanting to continue Blender in the direction of real time 3D multimedia?
On 2002-03-25 04:11, renderedbrian wrote:
The words “3d media field” are a little concerning. Does this mean that Ton is wanting to continue Blender in the direction of real time 3D multimedia?
No! The term “3D media field” means media that form part of the 3D field - games and realtime interactive presentation are two areas within the 3d field - animation, modelling, architectural visualisations, etc are other fields - but they all fall under “3D media field”.
So don’t give yourself a headache just yet! (Though this in no way assures that Ton did not have 3D multimedia in mind!!!)
We wait.
We see.
Then we react accordingly…
Hope I’ve managed to aleviate a little bit of your concern - momentarily as it might be!
Regards
Fabrizio
Who is becoming very skilled at typing while keeping his fingers crossed
This is just my opinion, but I think Ton has a tough sell on his hands. Any company that considers acquiring the product will also have to consider the amount of resources necessary to bring the app within their standards as far as the interface and functionality are concerned. To “Adobe-ize” Blender, for example, would not be a trivial task, nor would it be trivial to shoehorn Blender into Macromedia’s way of doing things. Of course, maybe there’s an option to drop the blender interface entirely, and just port the code that “does stuff” into their own shell.
I already own Lightwave 7 but since you mentioned it I thought I’d post a link. Newtek just changed pricing… instead of approx $2700 for LW7 they dropped it to $1500. http://www.newtek.com/news/releases/02-03-21-a.html
This means the upgrades will get cheaper!!! yippee!!
As for Blender’s interface … yes, it needs lots of help. The thing I love about Blender, however, is that it is very, very fast and responsive. If they Adobeized or Macromediazed Blender, it would take eons to start up on my crunk PIII machine, not to mention hog lots of resources.
