One of the great software rewrite battles that I know of is computer graphics sector. It was mid-90s and Silicone Graphics (it hasnt rebranded to SGI yet) was

One of the great software rewrite battles that I know of is computer graphics sector. It was mid-90s and Silicone Graphics (it hasnt rebranded to SGI yet) was the dominant hardware, and Wintel were too slow. In hollywood the flagship products were Alias PowerAnimator, Wavefront Visualiser, Thomson Digital Exploer, Softimage 3D for animation, Sidefx Prisms for particles/effects. PowerAnimator had the best modeling tools like NURBS. Softimage had best animation tools. None of these ran on Windows and all were running on SGI's own IRIX. Microsoft bought Softimage in 94 and ported it to Windows NT. Suddenly Silicon Graphics saw Wintel as serious threat. So they bought and merged Alias,Wavefront, TDI to form Alias|Wavefront and began to write Maya which would combine the technologies from all three. Softimage also started to write its new one codenamed at that time Sumatra which would eventually release as XSI. The race was on, and the two big giants SGI and Microsoft were having a proxy war now. Everyone was keen on seeing who is going to come out first and best product. Meanwhile Sidefx was also writing something new from scratc which they eventually released as Houdini in Dec 96. Sidefx has always been a smaller niche player and has stayed true to that till today. Maya 1.0 came out in Feb 98 and it was immense success. A lot of hollywood studios migrated to Maya because Sumatra was nowhwere near release. Eventually XSI came out around 2000 I think and it was too late, but not too little. XSI still had more powerful animation capabilities but they had lost a lot of ground to Maya interms of mindshare and customers. Eventually Microsoft sold Softimage/XSI to Avid. In the mean time 3D Studio from Autodesk was not a serious player when it came to hollywood stuff. So Autodesk bought Softimage from Avid. Unfortunately SGI also had real financial trouble due to Intel finally catching up interms of speed. They also sold Alias|Wavefront to Autodesk. So now Autodesk had the two major 3D graphics packages used in hollywood. Autodesk eventually killed XSI and continued Maya at their high end, and 3D Studio Max as their lower/medium end product.