XSI - some tough competition for Maya

For those of you not in the know, XSI and Maya are two leading and competing 3D Animation and Visual Effect software packages. I admit I'm a Maya user through and through and as such, I've been ignoring XSI for a while now. However, two weeks ago I attended an XSI evangelism meeting at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood and it finally pushed me over the edge. Don't worry, Maya is still where I call home, but I got a chance to see how aggresively XSI is working to gain market share. They pulled out all the stops and gave everyone in attendance a free XSI T-Shirt! While the T-shirt is nice, what really suprised me is that they also gave everyone a free academic license of XSI Advanced (it's got syflex and everything)! That's a $3000 or $300 value depending on how you look at it. Besides that, they awarded me a free XSI training class at Gnomon for submitting a 100 word essay on why I needed to learn XSI. That's a $900 value! It starts tomorrow! But dont worry, I havent been bought. The reason why Maya should be worried is that XSI really is motivated to get to the top and has the R&D to prove it. While Maya has been resting on its laurels and really only updating its simulation engines, XSI has developed some SERIOUS strengths, the newest of which is a visual scripting and tool development system called ICE. It's completely multithreaded meaning these tools scale perfectly across multiple processors and cores. What's more, they've gone ahead and rewritted many of the established tools in XSI to take advantage of this performance boost and opened up the tools so everyone can see how they were made and modify them at will. It's pretty amazing and why a technical guy like me should immediately stand up and take note. So if you've been ignorning XSI like I had, now's the time to learn it before everyone else does. People are staring to request XSI skills in job descriptions so it'll give you an edge - for a little while anyway :-)