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You're Doing WHAT Now? (12/15/99)
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Of course, while Apple generally produces the best drama, every once in a while another company manages to pull off something exciting. How about MetaCreations? Here's a company with a huge stable of creative graphics products, including several that the AtAT staff uses to produce this show: Bryce, Kai's Power Tools, Painter, Expression, and lots more. So what do they do? They announce that they're now planning to "focus solely on e-commerce visualization solutions for the web." Uhhhh... okay. That didn't come from out of left field; that came from out of the sports bar two blocks down.

So now the company's going to throw all its weight behind its MetaStream 3D web technology (basically, if you download and install a plug-in, you can stream 3D objects into your web browser-- oooooo), and the future of all those kick-ass graphics products is up in the air. According to the company's press release, MetaCreations "no longer sees the professional graphics business as offering growth as compared to its e-commerce visualization opportunities." Now, call us crazy (and we know you do!), but ditching Painter and Bryce to work on Yet Another Browser Plug-In strikes us as just a bit bizarre. Are people really going to want to download a plug-in just so they can look at a 3D model of that inflatable couch before they buy it online? Perhaps we just lack vision. Then again, when we tried to download and install the plug-in to try it out ourselves, all it did was crash our Mac. Hard.

Meanwhile, we admit we're a tad worried about the future of all those Metacreations graphics products, and we're not the only ones. A MacNN feature on this whole mess confirms that a hundred Metacreations employees are taking home pink slips for the holidays, the CEO of the company stepped down, and users of Bryce/Painter/etc. are all wondering just what Metacreations means by the phrase "divest its graphics software." It's a sinister phrase, and we don't like it one bit... especially since the elimination of Bryce, Carrara, Poser, and others would strike a serious blow to 3D creation on the Mac.

 
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From the writer/creator of AtAT, a Pandemic Dad Joke taken WAYYYYYY too far

 

The above scene was taken from the 12/15/99 episode:

December 15, 1999: Not much is shaking in Cupertino-- why not blast some aliens instead? Meanwhile, Metacreations pulls a weird maneuver by possibly ditching their graphics programs in favor of working on e-commerce 3D, and Microsoft finishes Windows 2000, while Mac OS X is still months away...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 1975: Do I Amuse You? (12/15/99)   Here we are again in the calm before the storm. Very little seems to be happening in the usually turbulent world of Apple Computer, as all the players are presumably scrambling around doing the holiday thing...

  • 1977: First Out The Gate (12/15/99)   C'mon, folks, let's have a hearty round of applause for Microsoft! They've finally finished Windows 2000 (The Operating System Formerly Known As NT 5) and sent it off for duplication-- "right on time."...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...
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