Well looks like this is the BIG news in the industry
Maya and Max are now brothers 
Let’s see if they play well together, i see this as great news for Linux and MAC users, they will have more support for Maya.
Hum that was a very good deal for Autodesk, very cheap, i think it would easily reach $250M, why sit on the money? It makes perfect business sense, very nice deal indeed, and kudos to Autodesk management team.
Its good news for all, Alias gets a big slice of the $300M R&D and goes back to it’s Research origins, and Autodesk gets more money out of the entertainment industry, and culminates some product failures on the automotive side, and technical illustration.
But i think that the acquisition of a smaller company with more innovative products, companies like luxology and pixologic would have been better news for us the costumers.
There are new paths to trail and using a research power house like alias to trail them and keep the rest of the team on making money is the right move.
Basically they bought a research company, so expect for AutodeskMaya 8 to arrive with some innovation on the character, mocap and asset management side (kaydara), and Autodesk3DS Max 9 to have better asset management and minor tool updates.
Alias engineers will have in their hands a great opportunity to create a new product that makes the production time shorter, developing content is becoming the major pain in both game and movie industry, 2y-3y is a long time for content production.
Good news Bad news you decide!