It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.
They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.
The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.
Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.