Simon, I think your perspective is a bit skewed. Softimage is a tiny cog in the Autodesk machine, somewhere around 1% of the company. Any layoffs resulting from that acquisition would be background noise, and anyway they would already have happened at the time of the acquisition.

Actually Softimage is the latest in a series of aquisitions.
Alias, Solid Dynamics, C-Plan, Colorfront, Compass Systems, Unreal Pictures, MechSoft, Linius, TruEInovvations, Revit, Discreet Logic, Skymatter...
And this is not a complete list.
It was inevitable that some will get the boot, all it would take was a period of recession, just like the curent one.
Good luck to the ones that got fired, I hope they make a new company that will buy Autodesk in a decade or so.

They did just aquire softimage XSI. Therefore its to be expected that they are going to fire all the extra redundant staff this created.