Leaving aside all the usual noise that gets generated whenever something happens over at DAZ, I wish the new team every success.

And now I'll generate some noise of my own.

Looking back at the timeline of the introduction of Daz Studio, they would have started work on it - early 2005 - at a time when Poser's future was uncertain under Curious Labs' tenure. Things didn't look good then, so DAZ would have been mad not to have some strategy to deal with the possibility that Poser would cease to exist: hence DAZ Studio, which was able to use all our lovely Poser content with little hassle.

Maybe DAZ thought that if Curious Labs went down the tubes taking Poser with it, they'd buy up the Poser assets for a song and all would be fine and dandy.

But e-frontier took over Poser's reins, presumably because of a real or imaginary synergy with Shade, leaving DAZ with Studio. No point keeping it as a 'me too' alternative to Poser now, so they may as well do something a bit different with it.

Five years later, with yet another change of owner for Poser (this time Smith Micro, and hats off to them for doing a great job) and some sort of merger between DAZ and another company I've never heard of, it's not surprising that D|S and Poser are very different from each other. But they're still competitors, and competition is healthy. As one adds new features, it forces the other to keep up. If either came up with something truly astounding, a real must-have that the other couldn't match, they'd assume a dominant position in the market.

Maybe DAZ thought it had that 'must-have' with SubD / Genesis - it is, after all, pretty cool - and that lots of us would abandon the good ship Poser and swim to DAZ Studio's shores. That hasn't happened.

Genesis' lack of compatibility with Poser may be technically unavoidable or difficult to resolve, but I suspect it's been commercially very painful for DAZ. Of course, they would love Smith Micro to hurry up and incorporate SubD into Poser, because that would open up the full market to their newer products. I can't see any urgency from SM's point of view, so DAZ are going to have to come up with something - the new CR2 exporter that's in the works is a start - just to get Poser users to a point where they can consider buying some of the newer Genesis stuff.

I sincerely hope that DAZ thrives and continues to develop great content, but I won't be switching to D|S just so I can use it.

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