You know, it occurred to me today after reading those press releases, that DAZ probably makes a LOT more money than Curious Labs. Curious Labs worked long and hard to produce a product that we use for years on end without upgrading... compare and contrast that to the amount of money the average Poser user has spent on models during the same time period.

Maybe Curious Labs should have branched out into 3d model creation. Hm. Interesting. To me, that implies that DAZ is fully funded and able to make a competitor to Poser, no problem.

I wonder which company will end up having the 'new Poser' - DAZ, or e-Frontier.

I must admit, I question DAZ's ability to provide tech support for such a product, given their past history. Maybe that's why they're providing it for free, so they have an excuse to avoid all the tech support calls, yet people still have a product that requires purchasing DAZ models. Ya know? Food for thought.

--Kamilche

Here's some food for thought... If D|S is going to use it's own format, but backward compatible with Poser, how many of the neato tricks that were found to work on Poser will work with D|S? How many more will D|S have?

What I find odd is that I have read about 50 posts in which people wax lyrically about Daz's amazing customer support and the lengths they go to to keep their customers happy, and then I read yours in which you question their ability to provide tech support "given their past history". What past history would you be referring to? Just curious, as I have not heard anyone complain about support from Daz before.

Sure. Well, I've commissioned custom work from them, back when they were Zygote. It was basically good, but they made a mistake on the specification - the man's tunic was supposed to have the belt separate, not 'nailed on' like it was (I commissioned the P4 tunics, in case you didn't know.) When I pointed it out and said I wanted it fixed, they refused, and said 'I'm getting much for my money.' When I contacted them about additional work, several times, they never responded.

Repeated questions about why 'Cool Coils' didn't resize in the xScale, went unanswered. Questions about various utilities went unanswered. Questions about missing files in a product I bought, went unanswered.

But whenever I demanded my money back, they were prompt and courteous. :-D So yeah. I have multiple reasons for stating what I did.

But allow me to rephrase - I don't question their ability to provide tech support, I question their DESIRE to provide tech support. That's a more accurate statement. Who knows - maybe I hit their 'shit list' when I requested my first fix.

Maybe I've been reading too much Dilbert lately. :-P But has anyone here had actual tech support from DAZ, that wasn't just a refund of money?

--Kamilche

Cool Coiled didn't rescale cuz Poser created a file bug when I saved it into the library. Just export, reimport and resave as a hair do. No company likes tech support because it is very very expensive. But To imply that is why DazStudio is free is silly. You don't really believe that do you? Since we , as users will use it more than the average Daz employee we might provide ourselves with prompter/better tech support as we always have with Poser. I never once remember CL answering a post before P5 when someone had a problem though. My opinion is Daz made studio to survice if Poser bombed and died. I think it is free so you will try it. IMHO -Anton

1. Re: DAZ = Bigger MoneyMaker than Curious Labs, I Bet by numanoid on 12/8/03 22:43 What I find odd is that I have read about 50 posts in which people wax lyrically about Daz's amazing customer support and the lengths they go to to keep their customers happy, and then I read yours in which you question their ability to provide tech support "given their past history". What past history would you be referring to? Just curious, as I have not heard anyone complain about support from Daz before. Just for the record, As someone who used too serve on the board of a major telemarketing company (bluechip media), I can tell you that the DAZ customer service department, or its equivalent over there, needs to make all kinds of improvements in their customer service. And I have complained about them before here as well. Their customer service is crap, compared to the CS at some of the other places. At daz the problems I have enountered, range from no replies to emails at all, too smarmy, or smart-alecky ones, too people who get on the phone when you call and act as if your questions are 1) Completely insignificant to them, and 2)Act as if your doing something wrong by calling them with a product question to begin with, or 3) I have even once had someone get on the phone at DAZ who acted as if they were doped up, or high or durnk. You know, slurred slow, unclear speech, in ability to focus on what is going on etc...

Well, it's hard to get help with Poser, because of the terrible search feature in these forums. Having to look for 'exact phrase' only makes it almost impossible to look for meaningful help.

But maybe the forums over at DAZ will pick up and get more lively. Maybe their search feature will work better, too. That'd be a help.

And that hairdo thing - I don't quite understand what you're saying, and I don't think most Poser users would either. I'm a tech person, but exporting and importing gets confusing, with all the file types and options available. Most of the time it fails miserably for me. And it certainly isn't clear to me, that that's what necessary to make the Cool Coils work. I wish someone at DAZ would a) find out it's broken, b) update the files using your fix, and c) notify customers about it... or at least post a patch at their store.

There was a fix sent by me months and months ago. It was supposed to have gone up on the page and the original file was supposed to have been replaced. I know they are aware because they asked me about it and we established the scale dial was broken. Sorry if the update was never posted. I don't work for them anymore so I have no influence. Sorry.There are people there who can fix it. It is a really easy fix. I think they forgot about the update. Regards, Anton

DAZ also has continuing development costs, brokerage fees, bandwidth charges, and store fees to set against its income (they sell one big-ticket copy of Poser per customer compared to DAZ selling multiple smaller packs at their store). Very few DAZ products will sell as well as Victoria, or even Michael. And of couse not everyone who buys Poser buys stuff from DAZ (OK, unfortunately, nor has everyone who buys stuff from DAZ BOUGHT Poser). I do agree that they will need to work on their non-refund customer interaction if the they want D|S to thrive, particularly with new users.

Customer Service is different than Technical Support. It appears DAZ's customer service quality may have suffered when two of their employees "left" (temporarily?!). Judging from my own experience, and those listed here, DAZ needs to learn about Technical Support. Anton, it's just plain wrong to ask a customer to provide his/her own technical support. I pay for a product, and expect the product provider to give me a good value, including Tech Support. You may be an "expert" at this stuff, but then you should have tested your product and fixed the problem before releasing it. And it's wrong to expect other people to have your technical abilities.

I have only had to call on DAZ's technical support once when I had a problem with an update for Michael's Trenchcoat. After a short e-mail conversation that failed to fix it, one of their technical support arranged a time to call me (which suprised me as I'm in the UK) and we spent about half an hour on the phone sorting it out. Curious Labs Tech Support are far worse in my experience. You are lucky to get a real response from them (as opposed to an automated response). I once e-mailed them if they knew about the bump map problems in P4 and if so, were they going to do anything about it. Their reply was to send the request via their web site fault logging system. I did that and got an e-mailed reply saying they couldn't process my request because I didn't specify what my CPU was. I replied to their e-mail telling them my CPU details and pointing out that this detail was irrelevant. They replied that I had to use ctheir web site to log the problem, so I did- re-entering all the details. I got an acknowledgement that the request was logged and heard nothing after that- which is what normally happens when I log a request.

Well, the few times that I've had to contact DAZ in reference to a problem, I've always received prompt and polite help. From a business standpoint, I think DAZ has provided a fantastic service to the Poser community as well as made a nice profit. I'm surprised that they didn't try and buy Poser. Maybe they were too deep into D|S?

Whenever I have a problem I tend to call. I've had pleasant customer service. Daz is a pretty small company, I don't know how the financial comparisons work- CL has had a few 'parent companies'...

'I'm surprised that they didn't try and buy Poser' I'm not surprised in the least. It would be like buying a ukelele to turn it into a Fender Stratocaster. If you wanted to get into the software market, would YOU buy Poser? As has been pointed out innumerable times in here, what Poser really needs is to be re-written from the ground up to make it compatible with current technology. If CL can't do that, why would someone else pay for it and try to do it. And if CL CAN do it..... why didn't they? mac

Well, I find it curious too. You'd think they would have been interested. Maybe they put in an offer that was refused?

Oh, I have a lead on the customer service issue. After talking with a few people, it appears there's a pattern - if you can manage to get them on the phone, all is well. If you only communicate via email, it's like talking to a brick wall - unless you want a refund. My friend, and several others, have had no problem getting tech support - but they always call and chat in person.

Hm. Guess I'll have to be pushier and insist on speaking to a live person next time. :-)

Of course I never understood why DAZ took such pains to split from Curious Labs when DAZ really owes its existance to Poser merchandise.

Well, how many times has Curious Labs been sold now? I wouldn't want to rely on them for anything. I think it was around the time that CL started firing everyone left & right that Daz started talking about Studio. Plus I wouldn't lay this at Daz's door. CL didn't go to Daz for Poser 5 figures, so you can say they shot themselves in the foot. Plus they initially wanted to charge an arm & a leg to make Michael & Vicky face-room compatible, and the horrid EULA that Poser 5 initially had made it so that many people, nevermind companies, never wanted to open the Poser 5 box. There was simply too much at stake.

I followed the EULA controversy. At first it looked like DAZ was looking out for "the common good." Then Curious Labs gave us what we wanted, and made some very good offers to DAZ concerning the face room. DAZ turns around and says "no thanks, we're making our own program. We're not sure when it will be ready, but we want to let you know about it." Now, a year later, they're going to offer the Alpha (beta?) version to their exclusive PC club members. The funny thing about the PC club is that it's changed its format or offerings so much that I never know what's going on. It used to be you saved money on many itmes if you got them with your PC Club membership. Now it seems that all/most of the PC Club stuff is exclusive to members. That means you're really not paying more if you're not a member. Or something like that.

By the time CL came around Poser 5 was already out, remember? So Daz would have been behind in making stuff specifically for it. Plus the CL finances at that time were horrible. It looked like they were sinking. They went down to a skeleton crew. There was a lot of speculation that the ship was going down, period. And look, it turns out that CL's parent company closed and CL was sold, so I'm still not sure what's going on there. Only time will tell, but if I were a major content provider I would have done the same thing Daz did- tried to make my own program so that I could be independent. And now I like the idea of having 2 options. A little competion is a good thing. Why should Poser have a monopoly? I've been a Platinum Club member for awhile now. It rocks. It has saved me more money than I want to think about. I have seen good improvemens. I'm happy with changes that give me more than I expected. There are exclusive items, that you can only get if you're a member, (the perks of membership) and there are items that you get in the PC first, but then become available at the Premium store at a higher price to non-PC members at a later date. The V3 morphing Fantasy dress, for one.