Thanks for the post Maurice. It's good to hear your point of view.

So I'm a little late to this discussion but I just wanted to make a couple of other points that I think are worth mentioning.

I can understand Chinny's frustration at the spread of negative rumours regarding the future of XSI. Particularly when it must be obvious to him that the AD XSI team is investing a lot of time and effort into pushing XSI forward. The point I want to make is that we as users are also investing a lot of time and effort into XSI. We have to keep our skills current with XSI and are essentially gambling our careers on the bet tha! t XSI is going to continued in the future. If we lose that bet, then the consequences are that we have to relearn a heck of a lot, and our careers will potentially take a hit. That can mean less money coming in.

From my experience seeing this happen before, most artists can move their workflows across and start to feel comfortable in somewhere around 6 months to a year (in a very general case). But the transition time is arguably much worse for technical artists and TDs, where they have to learn an entirely new SDK, and get familiar with *all* the workflows and technical hiccups so that they can competently support and advise the art team. In this case you're probably looking at about 3 years, maybe more, of getting to know the new software. Thats not even mentioning that TDs also have the added investment of all the code they've written; pipelines, shaders, tools, etc. all potentially wasted work.

I think th! at's the reason that this list gets a bit jumpy. Particularly since ma ny of the more active posters are TDs and arguably have more to lose. Fear mongering isn't a healthy thing to do either, and it should be called out when seen, but it tends to happen where there's a lack of information or feedback.

So the other thing that's worth mentioning is about our own responsibility for marketing XSI. We as a user base are one of XSI's biggest assets and best reasons for it's future success. Lagoa was created by one of us, not a member of the AD team, but has had a much wider impact on the internet than any AD press release could ever expect. 

There are a lot of print and web based magazines out there who are always on the lookout for new articles or tutorials, so why not start telling them about the cool work that XSI let's us do? Let's not whinge about it, let's start doing something ourselves. If your company has a PR manager or department, go and have a chat with them and see wh! at you can do. (One bonus is that it raises your profile and your company's at the same time.) While I agree that XSI's placement on the AD website isn't great and doesn't send a positive message, it's nowhere near as important as the general buzz in the trade press.    


BTW, just want to say thanks to Matt Lind for organising the meet up at Siggraph, it was great to get the opportunity to finally meet so many of you guys. And you all seemed so positive?! Not at all the bitter and twisted obsessives you pretend you are on here ;-) 

Cheers
A