11/15/07

Well, this has been an unexpectedly eventful day. Interesting times indeed. As usual the Poser Community demonstrates its immense reserve of imagination and restive creativity by producing four pages of speculation here at Renderosity three pages at Content Paradise forums, and several messages at RDNA, all from the very little bit of information that we presently have. I checked, but the prophesied mega-celebration of Poser’s demise has not started yet over at DAZ3D, where there is no mention of SMSI at all.

Anxiety is understandable. Anyone who has been around computers/software for a few decades has seen great products disappear literally overnight. One day a company is promising development, features, support, and a bright future, and the next day their web-page is off-line, and an answering machine tells everyone that the product line is closed out. There is absolutely no consolation in the axiom, "It’s not personal, it’s just business."

The Poser development team has been around for a while and has probably seen about every business model that one could imagine. If they, and most of the American E-F and CP staff, are staying on with SMSI, it sounds as if they like what they have seen in this deal. At the end of the day, they still have their jobs, and are speculating about great features planned for Poser 8. I hope it stays that way.

If the developers are still working to get Poser Pro out, it does not sound like Poser is already languishing in the garbage can somewhere. Maybe an established base of 500,000 users, a product line aimed at both small and large users, and a multi-billion dollar market in CG that still has potential for growth, proved attractive to a company looking to invest some money.

In acquiring Content Paradise, SMSI now has a real e-marketplace, and a very large stock of content and applications to sell, and not just the few applications that appear on some obscure Internet page. They also have partnerships with a number of content developers and other businesses. It will be interesting to see how their business model alters to handle these realities.

All things considered, clsteve has been very forthcoming with details. I see he’s been to a few blogs around today. Thanks for what you can tell us Steve. By the way, have we managed to perplex the folks at SMSI or have they even noticed us yet? Have they ever before seen anything like the Poser-verse? I would love to be able to watch the faces of some of the execs at SMSI reading this forum thread and I would love to hear the questions they would ask you.

LMK

http://www.poserpro.net

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.