While getting a product before everyone else is fun, the "early adopters" are usually the ones who get burned or laughed at. Has everyone forgotten about the iPhone? People lined up outside stores to buy it! Yet a few months later, Apple increased the iPhone's memory, gave it better wireless coverage and dropped the price.

A similar issue happened with Poser: a little while after P5 came out, Amazon put it on sale for $99. Sure, people had to wait months (or maybe a year) after it first came out, but $99 was over half off the normal price.

Plus, there are numerous stories, especially about Microsoft and Windows, recommending that people wait until SR1 or SR2 to make sure most of the bugs are fixed.

I'm not saying people shouldn't buy a product when it first comes out, but be watchful for extra sales promotions later on. Do you really need Poser 8 right now? Or can you wait until SR2 is merged into the installer or until Smith Micro or Amazon runs a sale?

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As for magazine reviews, I agree that I don't fully trust them either. Like some of the posters have said, magazines need advertising revenue to survive, so will they really risk angering someone like Smith Micro or Adobe by giving their software a bad review?
Okay, maybe some magazines have a "neutral" policy and tell their advertisers that software might be given a poor review, but in this economy, I wonder how many magazines bend this rule just so advertisers will continue advertising.

I'm also suspicious of 3D World's fairly good review of Poser 8 when there's a full-page ad for Smith Micro/ Poser 8 a few pages before the review. I'm not saying the ad influenced the reviewer, but if I were the editor, I would make sure there were no ads from Smith Micro in that issue just to make sure readers don't get suspicious.

The only magazine reviews I trust are from Consumer Reports: they don't run ads at all, so there's not even a hint that they're being influenced by advertisers.

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