"With character animation taking off as it has..." This is true to a certain extent. Poser fills the animation need, as Steve says for some in-house work, local TV, even amateur films. Poser still images show up in a lot of surprising places as well. My feeling though was that Poser would have achieved much greater popularity. I thought that as soon as an inexpensive and relatively easy way to create 3D human figures was available, people would flock to it the same way they have desktop publishing, photo editing and even "movie" making. Everybody and his brother seems to be cranking out their own Christmas cards, editing their digital photos and messing with a camcorder. Surely, there must be millions of people who gave up on art because they couldn't draw more than a stick figure. Those are the folks I thought would be snapping up Poser. Not so, at least not millions or even hundreds of thousands I imagine. Maybe they don't exist, maybe Poser is still too hard to use, maybe it's marketing or maybe there are just too many people who're uncomfortable with naked polygons, I don't know.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken