Quote - SM is a big company with many softwares.

(the juvenile portions of the above comment were snecked for brevity, but let's address the whole wad anyway: )

SM has approximately $64m in Cash and short-term investments, $30m in operating expenses, and around $16m in outstanding liabilities (short-term debt such as expenses). They were $12m in the hole this past quarter on $18m in revenue.

ref: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:SMSI&fstype=ii

Money-wise, if that kind of fiscal bleeding continues to go on (I sincerely doubt it does, but it'll be 6-8 months before they recover ), they can hold out for about a year, perhaps 18 months at their current loss rate.

I doubt it'll continue as a massive loss because the loss was sharp, which could indicate a lot of innocuous things. My guess is part Osborne Effect (in preparation for Poser 9/2012), part ramp-up expenses for launch (publishers, fulfillment, etc), and part lashing by Jefferies (which prolly shorted a bunch of SMSI right before they called it like they did).

OTOH, like you said - they have "many softwares", so it'd hard to tell how much impact Poser would have on the whole.

Size-wise, I would currently put SM at a rough approximation of 1.5-2x the size of DAZ, judging from what I recall of DAZ' figures back in 2005 or so (which means my guess may be way off by now, but it smells about right).

As for buying DAZ? That would require two things:

• DAZ would need to be in a state where they could actually be sold. Since DAZ isn't publicly traded, there's no stock to get controlling interest in. Basically, DAZ would have to go bankrupt, or be voluntarily put up for sale by the owners, or a court could order it. Otherwise, no dice.

• Smith Micro would have to recover from their current down-bounce, and fulfill their predicted bounce-back (forgot where I saw that prediction, but to be fair I wanted to include it).

All in all? Sorry, but nobody is going to buy anybody just yet. DAZ ain't big enough, and SM ain't profitable enough. Capiche?

 

 

(...I remember saying something about growing the hell up, but for some odd reason I think it was glossed over... )