I think Poser will probably hang around for a while simply because it does have so much content available, and because a lot of people already own a copy of 5, 6 or 7.  However I don't see a lot of folks paying to upgrade giving SM's new upgrade pricing structure, and I see even fewer actually paying the full $500 sticker price for a non-upgrade version.

So SM will eventually be forced to either get realistic in it's pricing structure and abandon this foolish quest to try and pretend Poser is something it isn't, a pro level app, or they will abandon development of Poser entirely once they realize that the market they thought was there just isn't.

Sure, Poser itself will continue for a while, even without upgrades or updates, but eventually even with such a strong aftermarket content market it will begin to decline as newer programs come out with better features that allow you to read poser content natively.

Once somebody comes out with a half way decent program that will read poser files and render them halfway decently without charging an arm and a leg for it Poser is going to be in serious, major league trouble.  It's become a case where the content supports the program, not the other way around.

So either Smith Micro will sell Poser to another company that doesn't have there heads crammed into a lightless orafice I probably shouldn't mention, or they'll simply abandon it at some point, or they might actually peek there heads out of that lightless orafice enough to realize they pulled the bonehead play of all bonehead plays, line there marketing department up against the wall and have them all shot and then hire some new marketing guys who aren't totally clueless as to how the 3d market actually works.

But I'd say it is probably most likely that SM's sales of Poser will decline rapidly, new upgrade versions will not fly off the shelves they way they expected, their will be serious and costly delays on the development of Poser 8 which will further complicate matters, and when they do release 8 it will be little more than what Poser Pro is, a minor upgrade from the previous version with most of the "new features" fairly unattractive to your average user and none of the old bugs or problems will have been addressed, yet again.

They'll want an arm and a leg for the upgraded version, probably even more than they do now, because they will have killed most of there of their other market share by then, and it will go over like a lead balloon, causing them to more or less abandon  Poser development all together.

In the meantime some smart programmer out there will build an inexpensive or even open source method of reading CR2 files into other 3d graphics apps and Poser itself willb e doomed, considering that even most open source rendering engines stomp firefly into the dirt for both speed and quality of render.

Nope, just a matter of time really, once people can start using there Poser content in another program with a nice usable interface that is simple to use Poser will slowly die.  Daz studio is making some inroads here, but it lacks some of the basic functionality it needs for a true takeover o the hobbiest market, and I doubt Daz will fix this anytime soon - they seem to have set a specific course for studio that doesn't include such features.

Guess will just have to wait and see, but personally that's my prediction.

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