Official support and backward compatibility are often two different things. There are plenty of applications that are no longer supported on new systems that continue to work just fine. Ending official support allows a company to disown any responsibility for possible problems while lowering support and development costs and goosing users to upgrade – at least that’s the way it’s probably supposed to work. Sometimes firms will continue to offer legacy support for a price or free on a case by case basis. That seems to be the case here, given the wording of the announcement.

It does seem strange to drop support for all but the latest version, but it depends on what their plans are. Daz seems to be continuing to develop Studio. Given the differences between Studio and Poser in areas like shaders and dynamic cloth, it seems to me that the “legacy” features represent a lot of the commonality between the applications. Unless they’re going to adopt the Poser 8 standards for Studio, they’ll still have to support two environments. That “might” bode well for Studio users since it “could” mean that they’re going to concentrate more on providing content optimized to the unique capabilities of each application.

The main potential problem I see is breaking changes. People will accept that Vicky XIV’s new soft body dynamic breasts don’t work in Poser 7 or DS 2, but they will have a whole lot of very unhappy customers if she doesn’t gracefully degrade to the old standard operation. Daz doesn’t have Microsoft’s resources or thousands of corporate users demanding legacy support, but unless they plan to turn their business model upside down and subordinate content to applications or delivery then they need to be careful about breaking things. Despite the Daz “addiction” meme, this is still a discretionary thing for most people. I think Mr. Farr probably realizes that, unless he’s still holding on to his shares of AOL. Maybe he has a magic black turtleneck.
 

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken