Quote - *Best talk to your wife and see if she can pickup some OT at work, because mark my words, your sales this next year will be a lot worse than they were in previous years, regardless of how good your products are or how many you put out.  The content market is going to suffer for Smith Micro's serious miscalculation in marketing strategy, just a matter of time.

I agree with you.  Just look at the arch-viz market or what used to be.

Exactly.  It will be a slow process of attrition at first, not many new users coming into poser and a lot of us older folks who are in the hobbyist realm starting to look at other options provided Smith Micro doesn't wise up and and at the very least set there upgrade pricing to a reasonable level.  I'm sure not paying $200 for an upgrade to a program who's full version only cost me $150, particularly when the upgrade itself could best be described as minor.

They have very little to offer the professional market at this stage, the firefly renderer can't even keep up with some rendering engines that are free and being developed under GNU licenses for goodness sake.  I've seen at least one that gives higher quality renders at better speeds.

The "integration" thing will be short lived too - collada is pretty much going to gaurantee that.  Won't be long before most of the better 3d applications can talk to each other, and why pay $500 for Poser when you can get another, much more feature rich app for the same price?  Just doesn't make sense.

So really Smith Micro had better have somebody in the marketing department sober up and soon, realize what a huge, major league, uber bonehead manuever they've made and fix it, or the Poser market is going to get hit and get hit hard.

It will start slow at first.  Not many new poser users will mean a decrease in over all sales for all artists out there.  There still be a market for some time to come, don't get me wrong, but sales will start to decline.

Pretty soon if Smith Micro decides to continue on this fools errand, a lot of us older Poser users are going to start poking around for other applications that will allow give us better features at more reasonable prices, or if we are going to pay the $500 bend over and bark rate at least were going to get a real pro 3d app for our money.  I'm not paying $500 for poser pro only to get nailed for another $200 a few months or a year from now when they put out there next minor upgrade.  Pass.  If I'm going to have to spend that kinda dough to stay in the 3d hobby then I'm buying a real pro package and getting reasonable upgrade rates for my troubles.

Eventually somebody will write an aftermarket utility to convert poser native formats to collada so they can be imported into most other 3d apps,  and then Poser is going to start dying a slow, painful death as is it's market.

Poser does have a strong, entrenched market, so it will take time, but it will eventually happen.  You just can't take a hyundai and try to sell it at the same price as a mercedes, no matter how many free CD's you give out for the hyndai's stereo system.  It just doesn't work.

My guess is though that Smith Micro will do one of two things, either they will realize what a really dunderheaded idea that was and switch gears to save poser, or they will sell it off to another company who will hopefully have a marketing division that isn't doing crack, and realize that they can't run away from the only market they have and survive.

I think Poser's market will be strong enough that it will survive long enough for one of those two things to occur, probably most likely the later rather than the former.  But either way it's going to hurt like hell in the meantime.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...