"DAZ also has the advantage because of those fora. Frankly, SM taking them down at CP was a mistake, no matter how underutilized they might have been. DAZ uses those fora to monitor what's going on, and it does so in a very immediate (well, more or less) way. The customer base feels it has virtually full access to the DAZ team because, in a way, it does. Farr drops by and talks to people. Cooper doesnt. And that is a seriously big deal to a lot of people"

I agree with that, but there's another, far more important way that DAZ keeps in contact with it's user base - The Bug Tracker. If I could give only one piece of advice to the Poser team, it would be "Open a public bug tracker!"

Through the DS tracker, I've reported dozens of bugs and seen them fixed. And I've requested dozens of features and seen them implemented. To me, that's what customer contact really means. The software may not be perfect (no program ever is), but at least they're willing to listen to my complaints and fix them.

Poser has always been a closed program in that sense. From time to time there are polls, but we never have a clue if we've been listened to until a new version comes out a few years later. The Poser team may well monitor these forums and wishlist threads, but there's not much evidence of it as far as the users are concerned.

At the DAZ chats on DS 3, Dan Farr came in and talked about the features, along with some of the people who designed them. It makes a big difference when you can ask the guys who wrote the program, "Hey! What does this do?" or '"Will we ever see X feature in DS?"

Whether you love or hate DAZ, you have to admit to that they at least get right down and talk to the people who buy their stuff. I'd love to see more interaction between Poser and the community, and I'd love to have somewhere to send a bug report, something I'd gladly do in the interests of improving the program for all users.

(Btw, I said all this to the Poser people in an e-mail years ago, so it's nothing they haven't already heard).

mac