Well I'm not exactly a big EF defender, but these numbers being thrown around are kind of silly and uninformed ^_^

*So, did you calculate all those who got P7 free as an upgrade?

*Those aren't new users, they already were legit Poser users and were already accounted for.   I've bought three versions of Poser now but I'm still only counted as one legit user.

^^ actually, you don't know that either - how do you know how you're counted?  do you work for EF's bean counter department?

Quote - *So, did you calculate all those who got P7 free as an upgrade?

*Those aren't new users, they already were legit Poser users and were already accounted for.   I've bought three versions of Poser now but I'm still only counted as one legit user.

Well, now, then if you're arbitrarily not using a certain percentage of the user base, your end percentage will be off.  That's not rocket science.  There are people (myself) who legitimately got P7 for free after buying P6 right before P7 was released.  Got Casino content that I haven't even loaded into poser once because I wasn't interested in it.  I was interested in the HDRI (but we'll get into that another time). 

You can't throw numbers around, then pick which ones you're going to use.  I've worked in statistics-based industries my entire adult life, and if I, or anyone in my company, were to make those bold claims, we'd either get fired or sued.

*no proof, but according to this websites own data there are over 500,000 members, 200,000 currently active (and these are old numbers)...

and those figures are wrong. they take into account non poser users such as Max users, Lightwavers etc who never come to this forum...

I'm not sure I follow... you have two versions but you're still only one purchaser and thats who I'm counting, not total sales of Poser but the total buyers.

That may be the way you would count it (and possibly the way it should be counted), but how can you say for sure how it's actually being counted? 

Well, you're saying that you're calculating the percentage of people who are pirating Poser (80%, by your "estimation") by the income of E-Frontier, based on what they published.  The numbers you're pulling...I'm going to assume that you've added up the userbase in some miraculous way, and possibly included people on sites such as renderosity that don't even use Poser.  So, Based on the fact that you're including Lightwave, Max, Bryce, Cinema 4D and even DAZ|Studio users in with your calculation....I'd say you need to start over.  You'd personally need to count every person since...God, what, 1998?....that ever said, on this forum, that they use Poser.  Then, calculate the revenue any company has earned from Poser.  Divide by the amount of people that said they use Poser, and you'll have your percentage.  It's about as fruitful, and useful, as dividing by zero. 
I'm all for getting rid of pirate users, but most of them out themselves.  Really.  They're not as schemingly smart as CNN makes them out to be.

Quote - do you work for EF's bean counter department?

Great question for 90% of the posters in this thread.

((Actually it's considerably less than 90% -- but let's not worry about mere trifling technicalities of that sort.))

Yes -- at the last efrontier board meeting which I attended, along with several other posters in this thread -- and before we scanned all of the company's financial records in minute detail -- the e-frontier and Smith Micro executives at that meeting announced to us that they wanted to squeeze everything that they could out of Poser, and then trash the program.  Of course I agreed with them, and gave them my personal go-ahead for the company to exercise that well-considered and well-thought-out strategy.  It's a great business model: certain to succeed -- and it will make them all rich!  So why not?

Daz may want Poser's name, but hey the game ain't over with yet. Let a bad owner let it get in really bad shape first and just want out and they'll get it for 3 million not six. They have solutions already and let's face it the expectations are growing on Poser's future releases. In order to make a big splash it needs a new look and to be completly rewritten for stability and function sake not to mention future improvements. I don't think it's so much that it needs more bells and whistles as much as it needs to have the ones it has improved. If the program itself gets too technical it's not going to be the gateway program anymore. It will be another high end app like the rest. Do high enders make up the majority of new Poser sales? For that matter do they make up the majority of content buyers? 

Piracy is a fact of life. Windows is still being pirated. Life goes on. There are too many countries still that don't enforce piracy laws.   

Amongst all of this hullabaloo, I have to wonder - what the hell is happening with Poser Pro?

If this is going to be a 64-bit app, that means a substantial re-write of the base code, which implies significant development. This gives rise to 2 possibilities with regards to its release:

1. The value of the Smith Micro aquisition includes the projected profit from the sale of Poser Pro, meaning that Smith Micro will release it at some point.

2. Poser Pro had sunk? Dead in the water? Publicity has been noticably reduced from Poser 6 and 7. E-Frontier dropped development of Poser Pro, got out of the market, and we will never see  Poser Pro?

Some have an enormous talent for sounding plausible while they engage in wild guessing -- while others have an enormous talent for just sounding.

I seem to recall having heard the following statement somewhere before -- but I've also heard that repetition is a Key to Knowledge, so perhaps this bears repeating:

We'll see what we see when we see it.  And we'll know what we know when we know it.  We don't know anything when raving street-corner prophets make their predictions and pronounce their anathemas in the forums -- but later.  When something's actually happened.  Then we'll know.

In the meantime: it's all blather.  Throw the street-corner prophets a bone.  Give 'em something to gnaw on for awhile.

Quote - Amongst all of this hullabaloo, I have to wonder - what the hell is happening with Poser Pro?

I think it can be taken for granted that the announcement of the "Pro" version had a lot to do with the commitment to buy from Smith Micro, and it seems very likely to me that it will be completeled.  HOWEVER, I think it's verrrrrrry unlikely that anything not explicitly promised will be sneaked in.

Quote - If Smith Micro was smart they'd slap a security feature right back on Poser and tell the complainers to shut up and actually try paying for Poser for a change.  Then it might actually make some money.

Actually, no - it would likely be cracked within a week, and the security feature excised. Right now there are copies of Vista floating about P2P that has been cracked; same with OSX 10.5, and damned near every program you can think of. Right now Poser 7, cracked, is available right there on P2P. Same with 3DS Max (which does have a lot of strong DRM features on it, and has had 'em for years - the cracked version however works just fine w/o it). The only thing DRM hinders is the legit users when the anti-piracy mechanisms go awry. It's been proven time and time again. -- > Quote - So, before you go accusing 90% of the people here, I'd suggest you either start backing up your claims with facts, or quit accusing

Jen? I think s/he is correct insofar that large numbers of folks who pop into Rendo for one reason or another are prolly using pirated copies of Poser and whatnot. While not 90%, I bet it's a pretty healthy number nonetheless - a quorum if not a majority. A quick peek among the usual suspect apps would show a healthy trade in warezed version of most stuff - including Poser. /P

I still say, firmly, that saying that 90% of the users here are using pirated stuff is perpetuating a fallacy.  You show me proof, I'll stop sayin' it. 

edited for clarity, I really REALLY need some sleep

To curtail piracy how about providing a serial number when purchasing content for Poser,  like we do in the 'Waver community.  

Incidentally,  in all my years here at renderosity and all the people I've met,  there was only one that had a pirated copy,  when,  to her embarassment,  it was brought to light after she contacted CL techs,  she promptly purchased a license.  

Point is piracy percentages is all conjecture until proof is in hand,  and I don't think it's prevalent here in our community.

*Quote -'To curtail piracy how about providing a serial number when purchasing content for Poser,  like we do in the 'Waver community. 

Or how about doing what Daz did - make the software available for such a low price that it's easier to pay for it rather than illegally download it?

I think that a lot people using pirated software would rather legitimately own it if they could afford it. The present paradigm with graphics software is that it's supposed to be notoriously expensive but this late in the game one may ask if this really needs to be so.

Poser is considered low priced compared to other graphic apps but how many copies would sell if it were priced at $50.00 rather than $200.00? This doesn't seem too outrageous to me when you consider that most purchases of Poser are of the download variety - no box, CD or manual :)

• Rick

You can't stop piracy - ever.  M$ has dumped millions into security to avoid piracy of Windows and other M$ products.  Wow, yeah, that worked.

As noted, the only thing these Draconian countermeasures do is make applications less stable and more difficult for paying customers - when they're not meddling with other operations (say, rootkits).  Go to Google, type in "interPoser Pro" and count the pages selling/allowing downloads of the cracked version.  Not only is it cracked (hey, I didn't use 'Draconian' countermeasures just something to keep most people honest and let them get on their way), but there seems to be a great distribution network.  This rivals any delivery system any multi-billion dollar conglomerate big-business could ever provide.

Dongles are chains.  Any software (hehe) that uses dongles is enslaving you for nothing.  They don't work, they can be easily circumvented.  The supposedly uncrackable encryptions being tested by even the governments have been shown to be crackable - you just need a network of a couple million computers and voila, a billion years shrinks to a couple months.  Give up already...

I'm reminded of a quote from president Mckinley,  "...No country has ever prospered from devaluing itself.;"  In essence,  I would rather see peoples wages increase than a cut in the price of Poser.

" I never won a chess game by resigning"

• Savielly Tartakower

I don't know how this applies to the discussion either but one good quote deserves another :)

I would prefer to see peoples wages increase too - especially mine! But until such time as that actually happens I think software vendors ought to consider the present day realities concerning software distribution - both legal and illegal.

It's a given that any software protection schemes are going to be circumvented and any popular software is going to be distributed through the ever increasing number of p2p apps and the like.

My point is that a sale at an affordable price is better than no sale at a premium one.

• Rick

Quote -
My point is that a sale at an affordable price is better than no sale at a premium one.

• Rick

Amen to that! 

I remember Turbo Pascal 6. At a sale price of 220 Dutch guilders (around € 100) it just wasn't worth copying the installation media and xeroxing the 1500 pages of manual (at 10 cents per page). You'd save about € 20. For those € 20 extra you had the manual in the form of three books (not 1500 A4 sized separate pages), plus official support. No wonder that Turbo Pascal 6 didn't suffer from piracy. Borland sold 100,000s of copies, making a solid profit.

Piracy is a continuously bad situation with software.  It has been around since the earliest days and is a known factor in the downfall of many, many, many software companies both big and small (the list would probably fill an encyclopedia).  Lowering prices may curtail some piracy by drawing in those who would have purchased otherwise if not for the cost, but it won't make much of a dent I think.

There aren't any ways to win against it.  Even if the OS companies could devise a very good encryptive obfuscation scheme into the executable code (so that it is opaque and closed) and the CPU industry a hardware protection layer between the CPU and access of its operation (make the CPU operations opaque), it is almost guaranteed that there is some industrious aholes out there (possibly with funding or even governmental support) who would spend the time and money developing hardware to break that even (i.e.: hey, we'll put a sensor between the CPU and its slot to capture all of the instructions and operations - not even remotely improbable).

The solution - everyone gives away their software and some alternative mechanism be emplaced for financial prosperity.  Any takers on how to achieve that? ;)

I wonder if Smith will lower the price of Poser when Poser Pro is released.

Was lagging sales the reason EF sold Poser?  I thought the reason was that they couldn't get it to work properly with that gawd awful Shade.

At fifty bucks you'd have to sell 120,000 copies to get back 6,000,000 at fifty bucks. 

Now if you sell the crap out of content you could probably give the program away and just pay for limited product development and pay for it with an annual club membership system and cheap 1 and 2 dollar items plus tons of promotions and freebies to keep them coming. It's already being done and so far it works. :)

Since Smith is a public company,  maybe some in the community will buy into it.

Let me add something to this discussion about software piracy and Poser. There was (and is) a strong incentive for buying a legal copy of Poser. At E-F you can only download updates after you registered with your serial number. If you want to have updates, serials generated with a keygen are useless since E-F knows which serials had been assigned to legal copies. Moreover, as a registered user you were granted free content which was in fact worth at least 100 $. So Poser was not expensive at all. I bought it, I decided that it is not the program I like to work with, but I do not regret buying it since the content I got was alone worth the price.

What impact does piracy really have on the software business? Adobe, Microsoft and Autodesk, to name just a few well known companies, prove that you can make a lot of money in spite of piracy. Microsoft has the easiest job. The WGA is quite efficient and if you have a computer that is connected to the internet you will sooner or later get into trouble if you have a pirated copy. Moreover MS software is cheap enough to be affordable for everyone and the operating system is bundled with most new computers. Autodesk and Adobe have a different strategy. They have mostly given up the hobbyist market and concentrate on the professionals to whom they sell their software at prices that cannot be afforded by most hobbyists. The copy protection they implement is more or less an alibi. I think they can live with hobbyists using pirated copies since the more people know their software the better it is for them. Think about how many companies employ people who have learned their skills in school or university or even at home by using pirated copies of 3D Max, Autocad and Photoshop. The same strategy worked well for MS and now, having a quasi monopoly, they are more serious about fighting piracy.

Lets get back to Poser. Poser did not fell victim to the software pirates but to bad marketing and poor software design decisions like the music industry was not eroded by P2P but by the quality of the music they tried to sell. It is an absolute mystery to me why E-F only had revenues of 6 or 7 Mio.I have to believe it because its the official number but this number is unbelievably low. My only explanation is that many newbies are satisfied with the free DAZ studio, that many of the the more serious users have switched to high end apps like 3D Max, Maya or C4D (pirated or not), that E-F could  not convince loyal Poser users that P7 was worth the upgrade price, that they realized that the new Carrara will drag even more people away from Poser and that e-shops like Renderosity and DAZ provide better content at lower prices so that sales at Content Paradise were not high enough to justify further Poser development. In this case selling Poser was just consequent and I do not believe that it will survive.

Hmm, so what happens to our accounts over at CP???

I agree with most of that but...

So you think.  Almost every commercial Cinema 4D plugin is available in cracked versions online or on CD (! buy now!).  These are 'professional', but not like $900+ most of them.  These are individual or small development companies here usually selling in the range of $50 to $500.  I've seen long lists of cracked everything from the simplest plugin to OSs and so on.  You haven't looked deep enough.

As I mentioned, my plugin is $150 (a lot of bang for the buck might I mention) and has been cracked since day 1 (v1.0.0).

M$ would make a profit if they had no piracy protection.  They are the TOP OS on the planet since like 1990 or prior.  They sell literally millions of copies (if not 100's of millions).  When you are much lower down, such predation hurts.  How about M$ puts more money into helping us guys avoid piracy instead of stuffing their bank accounts (how much is Billy G worth these days - a few pennies?)?

On Poser, remember that the Amiga computer went down for this reason - bad marketing and poor competitive design as the market was opening.  Think on it.

I suspect many never looked at the value of the content that was packaged with P7 or the fact that when Miki 2 came out I think the base figure was free if you had bought Miki 1. I also got Jessi 2 free. I stayed with Poser and I've bought all mine and a lot of the EF stuff. I've been happy with the cost when compared, but I got Hexagon for 1.99 and Mimic for a 1.99 and countless discounts from Daz that make up the vast amount of my stuff. Hey, they put the pressure on Poser and Content Paradise and didn't budge, this most likely is the reason you see a sell out of Poser. The competition tuck tailed and ran. It took a lot of work to accomplish that and Daz deserves a tip of the hat. Congrats!

Seeing as how there are a fair number of nations on the earth wherein copyright law is essentially meaningless (Russia, China, various Southeast Asian, African, and Southsea Islands locations) -- and that all of those countries have entrepreneurial types with servers and with no qualms whatsoever about using those servers to distribute whatever their various governments are willing to ignore online:  it's impossible to police them, or to stop piracy.

So -- software can and will be pirated.  The only areas of the world where copyright law has so much as a slim chance of being enforced are all in Western nations.  Otherwise, 'citizens of the world' are pretty much free to do as they like.

The only real threat to them might come from hackers.  Other than that: they can laugh at the rest.

*quote: but I got Hexagon for 1.99 and Mimic for a 1.99 and countless discounts from Daz that make up the vast amount of my stuff

... and I'll bet they could sell Poser for $49.99 and make a lot of money too :)

• Rick

A pity, but of little interest to me. I switched to DAZ Studio because Poser 7 was bug riddled and
crash happy. Even with the service releases, it crashed, on average, two or three times per
session, and the crashes had no apparent common denominator. SIGH. If anything, maybe,
just maybe, these guys with produce a more stable version. They certainly can't do worse since
I can use P7 for rigging and basic set up, but as a renderer, it is too unreliable. All we can do is
to keep our fingers crossed on this. 

Greywolf

Is Poser's SDK available to programers?

Kuroyume, I can understand your point and I am quite familiar about what is available over the internet. Just use a simple usenet search engine and you ask yourself why you should pay for software at all. This is a fact and it will not go away anytime soon. It is clear that individual developers and small companies are hurt more than the big guys. But I also ask myself how many professionals who make money by using your plugin are using a pirated copy. The people who are using a pirated copy of your plugin probably also use a pirated C4D. They will nerver become paying customers.  If they had no access to a pirated C4D they would have no use for you plugin. Any efficient copy protection, maybe something implemented directly in Windows, would also prevent them from using a pirated C4D and because they would never pay the price for C4D they also would nerver buy Interposer. Can you give me an example of a software company which died because of piracy? I don't know any but there is a large list of companies which were killed by their competitors like Lotus, Borland and Fox killed by M$, Macromedia killed by Adobe and E-F Poser killed by DAZ, to name just a few.

You guys make it sound like everyone is stealing 3D LMAO. I think it's funny. I find it very laughable. P2P is all but shut down. Everytime these threads comeup it's always the samething. If it was easy to steal, then no one would need to buy anything. Get over yourselves, seriously. I'd like to know how people are spending all their online time, stealing all these high end apps that are well over 1gig and the models that go with them? LOL. Yeah right.

Too bad you don't realise how stupid you all sound. I'm still using P5. And will continue to use it no matter who buys Poser. Too bad these threads never can stay on topic. Poser is outdated trash, I don't care who owns it. D|S is ten times newer and it's free.

(MHO)

Ah yes, the whole world is out to steal Poser and Poser models. lmao.

Quote - Too bad you don't realise how stupid you all sound.

snort

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

:b_grin:

ok, let's not get into personal attacks, otherwise I'll have to lock this thread and start handing out warnings.

*Quote_"Too bad you don't realise how stupid you all sound. I'm still using P5. And will continue to use it no matter who buys Poser. Too bad these threads never can stay on topic. Poser is outdated trash, I don't care who owns it. D|S is ten times newer and it's free."

*If Poser is outdated trash why are you still using P5?

DAZ? DAZ? Oh yes, DAZ3d! Isn’t that the enterprise that gives away DAZ Studio (1.8) for free? The one with about 328,456 downloads of its present Studio version? You know the one I mean, it requires its 18 available plugins to work about as well as Poser 5-6, and they only cost $439.62 USD? That doesn't sound anywhere near free to me.

DAZ is so committed to its Studio that all of its content is available in Poser format, and one has to download an extra DS file to make it compatible with DAZ Studio. Poser is the model that DAZ immunlates for its Studio's features. To be honest, this sounds more like a backup plan for marketing their content if Poser ever actually fails as a product.

I have noting against DAZ Studio, I even tried it several times, and it was harder for me to use than Poser. Without the Studio plugins, Poser does more right out of the box, and Poser is cheaper, when one considers all things. Poser is not perfect, but it rarely crashes on me, and I am looking forward to seeing what Poser Pro brings to the mix.

I hope that DAZ Studio continues to improve, and encourages innovation in the Poser line. But, I think that Poser is the better product for me.

Quote - You guys make it sound like everyone is stealing 3D LMAO. I think it's funny. I find it very laughable. P2P is all but shut down. Everytime these threads comeup it's always the samething. If it was easy to steal, then no one would need to buy anything. Get over yourselves, seriously. I'd like to know how people are spending all their online time, stealing all these high end apps that are well over 1gig and the models that go with them? LOL. Yeah right.

Too bad you don't realise how stupid you all sound. I'm still using P5. And will continue to use it no matter who buys Poser. Too bad these threads never can stay on topic. Poser is outdated trash, I don't care who owns it. D|S is ten times newer and it's free.

(MHO)

Ah yes, the whole world is out to steal Poser and Poser models. lmao.

1. I never said P2P.  Either my eyes are realllly bad or the long list of 'warez' sites online never really mentioned my and other software.  You sound silly now, huh?  Did you actually type in "interPoser Pro" into Google and count the number of warez sites (nearly 14000! - some may be duplicates but still).  Now try "Cinema 4D" warez - a mere 750,000 hits.  "Poser 7" warez returns nearly 100,000.  P2P might be dead - but now you'll tell me that the internet is dead.  Yah, right...

2. Yes, there are millions of people stealing software all over the globe.  A large part of China's Windows base is cracked software.  Russia is a Black Market heaven for crackers, hackers, virus writers, and warez.

3. And Poser 7 can't be downloaded huh?  Believe me (as I know), people will spend days downloading cracked software (one) - heck, it's free.  You underestimate how far people will go to get free software.  And how fast connections can be.  Mine is a paltry 1Mbps and I can download Poser 7 in a couple of hours (the legal one, of course).  Someone at a business or university with a full T1 running 100Mbps, they laugh at your underestimation of their diligence............

Just google 'Warez'.
That tells the whole story. 55,500,000 results.
If 10% of that number is warez download sites,...
How stupid to think that could be a problem for digital commerce.:tongue1:

I just got  the below crappy spam from Smith Micro.

I've got a bad feeling about this.

Has Poser been aquired by a software "used car dealer"?

Hey Jeffg3

Please tell me this is a joke!

No joke :(

Link

11/17/07

If I understand the dialogue on this thread for the last two days correctly, then

1. Jeffg3 only needs to figure out how to download a pirated copy of "PDF Converter 4" from somewhere on the Internet.
2. This will immediately bankrupt and destroy Smith Micro (SMSI).
3. Once SMSI is out of the way, DAZ3D can buy Poser and sink the application so that
4. DAZ Studio can be the undisputed number one low end rendering software.

LMK

Wow Jeffg3,  looks like Poser is headed for C/net or ZDNet.  I hope they don't add Gator!

Hey lkendall

Add 5.  Zygote call in its' marker with DAZ and content prices increase by 100%

Quote- "... and I'll bet they could sell Poser for $49.99 and make a lot of money too :)"

I wouldn't dispute that for a second. Advertise it as much as possible too. The end result would be that it would pay for itself and much more. 120,000 sold worldwide is peanuts. The actual numbers would probably dwarf 120,000 sold just inside of a year. You begin to think Smith Micro got a good deal on Poser. It could be a real milk cow. 

Quote - If I understand the dialogue on this thread for the last two days correctly, then 1. Jeffg3 only needs to figure out how to download a pirated copy of "PDF Converter 4" from somewhere on the Internet.

1. This will immediately bankrupt and destroy Smith Micro (SMSI).
2. Once SMSI is out of the way, DAZ3D can buy Poser and sink the application so that
3. DAZ Studio can be the undisputed number one low end rendering software.

Sounds good to me! ;)