It almost seems as if the current situation between Curious Labs and DAZ is somewhat similar to what happened between Apple and Microsoft before Windows 3. At that time, Apple had the killer application with their operating system. Even today, allegiances are very strongly polarized between Mac's operating system and Windows. Before Windows 3, there was no contest that the Mac was a clearly superior machine for desktop publishing and graphics work. The best graphics applications were made for the Mac and the Amiga. Way back then, Apple could have ported their operating system to the PC world and probably have killed the then nascent and only marginally useful Windows operating system. At that time, Apple was in the business of selling computers and the operating system was just the unique application that made their computers the hardware to get (at that time, Apple made $1000 profit on every $6000 machine sold--an almost unheard of profit margin). Micosoft eventually released a more functional visual operating system with Windows 3 that quickly buried DOS and stemmed the tide of people and businesses switching to Macs and eventually gained a stranglehold on the vast majority of computer systems. For whatever reasons, Curious Labs has stayed out of the Poser figure business. Before Poser 4, Poser was mostly an art assist program. A figure could be posed and lit and brought into a paint program to realize a work of art. The resolution of the figures was marginal. There wasn't a lot that could be done with them and there wasn't much third party availability for Poser content. Poser 4 upped the ante, providing figures with a much wider range of emotional morphs and, as primitive as the P4 figures seem today, a much more realistic set of figures and props. It was Poser 4 that created a demand for more compatible products and opened up marketplaces for that content. Curious Labs sat back and watched this content market grow without making any attempt to be one of the content vendors. To some degree, it wasn't a bad strategy. The more Poser content there was, the more interest there would be in purchasing the program that would allow that content to be used. Although I haven't read any detailed accouts about what caused DAZ and CL to take diverging paths with Poser, it's clear that the fashion in which Poser 5 was released created a rift between the two companies that is culminating with DAZ creating their own posing software. DAZ has never supported Poser 5 other than where they had to so that they could continue selling their content to Poser users. DAZ is working diligently to release Studio so that they can control the direction of their Poser content. It wouldn't be surprising if the failure, of the Poser 5 figures to become the new Poser figure standards, was the signal that DAZ had taken something important away from CL. If DAZ owned the standards for Poser content, DAZ had a foothold for controlling where those standards could go. The fact that DAZ refused to support Poser 5 hurt Poser 5 sales. I've read more than one instance here of people who bought Poser 5, but never used it. There seems to be a very large Poser 4 base that has seen no need to upgrade and part of that reason has to be that DAZ has basically dismissed the capabilities of the newer program. CL is sort of like Apple and DAZ is sort of like Microsoft. DAZ is in the process of creating what they hope will someday be a competitor or replacement for Poser. The fact that DAZ will be giving away the base Studio software will ensure fairly wide usage if it proves to be a functional alternative to Poser. The real money is in the content. The average DAZ customer spends more per year than they ever did on buying the application. There's no information that CL is reacting to this change in the marketplace. They are getting ready to release Poser 6 and I suspect that it will be a comparative failure to earlier releases. From the information CL has released, Poser 6 will not contain any new features. It will mostly be a major upgrade for the engine to allow it to take advantage of the rendering capabilities of modern graphics cards. It's probably going to be a bomb because CL will probably price it as a brand new $300-$400 application with a $150-$200 upgrade price. A good proportion of Poser 4 users never upgraded to Poser 5, so they couldn't care less that 5's been improved. Poser 5 users will likely be resistant to a new product that is more Poser 5.5 than Poser 6--it's basically the product they were hoping 5 would be--stable and faster. If DAZ Studio becomes a capable application, and will likely be the lead for new figure innovations. Why pay a full application price when there's nothing new to the program when there will be a free program that does the job? There's intereting things in the Poser future. I wonder if history will dictate the directions for the future or will it just be repeated?

I don't think either is going to try to stifle the market..they're complimentary companies in the business sense; Curious Labs started the ball rolling (as I understand, they actually didn't make the original figures, but bought or licensed them from someone else), and DAZ has run with it. I think DAZ is offering a potential competitor, but neither is an absolute monopoly (we'll see where the business with Shade leads..;) on the figure creating or posing business.
I've never bothered upgrading to 5 (I'm still using 3 and 4..and have a lot to learn about both..;), and have played with D|S a little. There's a new interface to get used to, and I probably need to play with it some more (now if they would only leave behind the 'must render by date' concept for the addons, I'd be happier..;)
I haven't learned everything there is to know about either Package, but they both show promise..both are still in development, so they'll fix the old mistakes of the last ones, and have time to make new ones..;)

CL was never in the figures business they were in the application business at first the creator of Poser was trying to make a program to do simple pose for art references and since they were the only game in town with a reasonable price and the ability to do more then simple posing it mushroomed and Zygote made the figures for P3+ after the community grew immensely the Poser division of Zygote broke off to form DAZ who realized potential and the rest is history I believe the advent of Daz Studio was a cover your behind tactic after there was a lot of (unfounded)grumbling of a CL collapse so that is only smart business to create an alternative to all the content they are providing. my $0.02

CL does not have a Steve Jobs, and DAZ hasn't injected money in CL to help it survive. This said, Poser was mainly a mac app in the beginning, and its translation to PC has been a bit awkward. Things did look bad for P5 one day, and the whole community staggered. At that moment, DAZ started making their own app because it looked like Poser had no future. Since that Japanese company has taken CL under its wings, things are changing. But DAZ should not stop as most Poser users work only with Daz' meshes (V, M, SP, dragon,.... Seeing Posette or Don is rare. To come back to your original comparizon, without Intel no G4, and without Win2K and Linux, no OSX. Concurrence is a good thing for price, and for quality.

I think it's clear at this point that for a low end "commodity" figure rendering app, the business model is the shaving industry model. There you basically give the "razor" away and make a killing on selling the razor blades. In this market, you give away the rendering app and make a killing on selling the content. I think Curious Labs/Poser is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Though many here on the message board do take advantage of many of the features of Poser, I think most users are only using it to access DAZ's content to make "simple" images and animations. They don't care too much about nodes, ray tracing, or the face room. The lure isn't Poser - it's V3. Studio is not a cya move anymore, if it ever really was. DAZ will wrest this niche away from Curious Labs if Curious Labs does not focus more on the content market. All it will take is for V4 to be only usable in Studio and incompatible with Poser. And if you don't think DAZ would do something like that, I've got some swamp land in Arizona to sell you. It's in their best interests to control this niche from top to bottom. They'll sell you Studio for $50 a pop, all the while making $100's on selling you their figures and the accessories. Going all in on just a basic V3 setup (figure, morphs, texture, hair, clothing) costs at least $100. Heck they'll probably give studio away to platinum club members, or anyone who buys X amount of content - oh wait, they already are. DAZ could be aping MS, but CL will not have the luxury of becomming an Apple clone in this scenario. At that point the party's over for CL - sure there will be die hards that still will use it and make things for it (for a while), but the money will have moved. There won't be a split, Studio will replace Poser - unless CL starts creating/brokering high quality non DAZ content. This is not an if, it's a when. Unzipped

Just to add, in this scenario DAZ is comparable to MS, and CL is somewhat comparable to IBM. Back in the 80's in the pc venue, IBM thought the hardware was the thing, they didn't think there was any money in the software, so they left development of that to others - oooops. They're just recovering from that mistake the last five to ten years and only had the luxury to suffer that failure and make a come back because they had so many other things going to keep them afloat. Curious Labs seems to be falling prey to the same kind of thinking - their hardware is Poser, they're letting DAZ run away with the software - figures. It's a losing bet, and while the new parent company may be able to survive losing that bet, Poser won't. Unzipped

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"Before Windows 3, there was no contest that the Mac was a clearly superior machine for desktop publishing and graphics work. The best graphics applications were made for the Mac and the Amiga." Eh! What about DRDOS, GEM, Ventura Publisher and Timeworks then? Sheesh, some people have short memories. John

Stop..yer embarrasing me..next thing you'll be talking about Pathworks and Vax..;) Actually used Ventura..on 5 1/4th floppies..;)

My first brush with "DTP" involved a teletype, an acoustic coupler dialling up an ICL mainframe, a PMT machine and a Xerox the size of a Ford Escort. The latter used to break down at least once an hour. If we missed our "slot" on the mainframe it meant a 12 hour wait for the next one, just to format some text!

I never used Ventura, bur I did use Deskpress/Timeworks with GEM on an 8086 (5" floppies) for a couple of years. It was actually quite quick - until you came to print, then it was around 1 hours per A4 page :)

John

In the comparison department, let us not forget that MicroBill Gate$ played an very big part in Mac/Apple at it's startup...then went on to form Microsoft and stated 'breaking' Windows. Not only that, but if memory serves me right MS helped bail Mac out of a financial disaster a few years back. Facts which I don't see happening between Daz and CuriousLabs..LOL.

What about DRDOS, GEM, Ventura Publisher and Timeworks then? I've never used DRDOS, but wasn't it just a competitive version of DOS and not a graphical interface? GEM, I seem to recall, got sued out of existance by Apple for being too close to their interface (would have been smarter if they bought it out and leased it as a PC interface). Wasn't Ventura, in that timeframe, still a DOS app that could do a print preview to show what it would look like printed, but wasn't a visual WYSIWYG application that could be modified live? It wasn't that there wasn't competition on the PC side as much as it wasn't as good. If I remember right, MS paid Apple to settle, once and for all, their interface look and feel suits. I can't remember if they kicked in some extra $ to help them or if that was part of the settlement. Considering that a number of Mac's most successful software applications were written by Microsoft (most of the PC Office suites started as Mac programs), MS didn't have too much to worry about who won the OS wars. I don't want to get too hung up with the analogy. I was focusing on only one aspect of the comparison--which was a company dominating a field it exploited (Apple with it's graphical operating system--which really was innovated at Xerox; and Curious Labs with the first widely accepted consumer-oriented figure posing software) and then not having the foresight to see where the real profit could be made (with Apple not exploiting their operating system in the PC environment; and CL not getting into the figure creation business). There's a lot of other aspects of the companies that bare no relation to the analogy or to each other. Even if there isn't an antagonistic atmosphere between the two companies, and I really don't know whether or not there is, Poser and DAZ Studio will eventually have incompatible formats if for no other reason because they can. I still haven't had a chance to try Studio, but doesn't it already have its own native format and a different filing system for content?

I can see the CL/Daz & Poser/Studio connections getting very interesting in the near future. With Daz Studio still in the formation stages, and CL announcing the pending release of version 6...the merry-go-round has already started up. Curious Labs has already taken the first steps in character creation in version 5, and with the addition of the modelling program Shade[?]to their arsenal they will definately push this development further in the near future. Daz Studio does have some native format and unique content filing capabilities, but is still going to be backward compatible to Poser in most aeas...something that I believe will also change in future releases of D|S. My guess is that by the 3rd Service release of Poser 6, and Daz Studio verion 2...they will be two entirely different programs with few cross-over capabilities. I further predict that Poser 4 is going to eventually become the Golden Classic of figure posing software; at least it will be on my computer.

Eventually, Poser 4 compatibility will go by the wayside, but I don't know how long that will take. Doesn't WinXP still provide some minimal compatibility with DOS applications? It will probably be many years before backward compatibility with P4 ceases.