I f you didnit catch the report earlier this week, Alias|Wavefront is now known as Alias. We sat down with the company to get a closer look at Maya 5, which was announced earlier this year, and to find out how the company is doing in the Mac market.
Alias entered the Mac market at Macworld San Francisco 2001 with great fanfare. At the time, Richard Kerris, who was then Director of Maya Technologies for Alias, but has since moved to a position at Apple, told The Mac Observer (TMO) that he was shooting for the Mac to account for 50% of Maya sales. Though official internal goals for the company were not quite so ambitious, TMO was told by Rob Hoffmann, Senior Maya Product Manager, that Alias is halfway toward Mr. Kerrisis more aggressive goals.
According to the company, Mac sales account for some 25% of Maya sales in the US. In Aliasis worldwide sales, Mac OS X accounts for some 20% of Maya sales, a slightly lower figure, but very respectable.
This could be why the company made a simultaneous release of Maya 5 for all the platforms it supports, including Mac OS X. Previous versions of Maya were released later on the Mac than on Windows, Irix, and the other platforms Maya supports.
The company is working with Apple to move Maya to the G5, as well. Though Rob Hoffmann refused to offer anything quantifiable on how well Maya performs on Appleis newest Power Macs, demurring until the hardware has been finalized, he did tell us that the Power Mac G5 is fast, emphasizing the "fast" in fast. We pushed to get some comment on just how fast, and whether or not Maya performed better on the G5 than on other platforms, but Mr. Hoffman and the other Alias representatives present declined to offer specifics.
In other news from the company, Alias is reporting that Mayais education sales have increased by some 25%.