Very succinct. I agree with more than 90% of your comments.

The only reason I have any interest in Genesis-is the ground breaking content from Mec4D i.e., the fiber hair and facial hair. It works really well with the Morph follower capability-which allows it to move properly in conjunction with morphs. Take a look at her current Neanderthal character- fantastic. True-SOMEONE might be able to figure out something comparable with the hair room-but I've yet to see it.

The other benefit WAS that Genesis bends much more naturaly than V4.  I spent many hours as a beta tester putting V4-WM and the clothing converter app through their paces to assist Cage, Phantom, Shvrdavid and others in Weight Mapping V4 so she bends nearly as naturally as Genesis.

 

Quote - Genesis isn't killing DAZ - DAZ is killing DAZ.

The company leadership continues to make the same bone-headed moves that they have been making for a number of years. 

DAZ does not learn from their mistakes.  The scary part is that they may not view them as mistakes. 

DAZ really thought everyone who shopped at DAZ would just dump their Poser workflows for DS4 because DS4 had genesis.  A year later, DS4 still doesn't have documentation, all core features out of beta, etc.  It is still a half completed piece of software that can't be finished as long as Daz refuses to get to feature freeze.

Imckenzie, you are not the only one that has notices that DAZ wants to build a closed ecosystem like Apple.  Don't point that out in the DAZ forums though, your post will be swiftly deleted.  More on that later.....

The problem is that DAZ has absolutely no clue as to WHY the Apple ecosystem works like it does.  The Apple ecosystem works because everything in it "just works".  Apple has an OCD approach to fit and finish.  Can anyone with a straight face say that about anything that DAZ makes?  I didn't think so.

 

Lets start with Business Processes....

If DAZ has a business plan, they need to start following it.  The customer base has been drug pillar to post with changes in strategic direction  Re: The "It's Not Fair" thread in the old forum.  DAZ (for once) laid out how they were going to handle sales in the future.  It lasted all of about 90 days and they were back to "sales all the time" - after stirring up the natives.

Killing revenue streams - Making DS4P available for free after attempting (apparently unsuccessfully) to sell it guarantees that no one will EVER pay for it.  People know they can just wait a couple of months and DAZ will give it away.  And why did they do that?  Because nobody was buying the Content Creation Tools.  How do I know that?  I counted the genesis specific products.  From the release of DS4 to the beginning of March Madness, there were 300 items for sale (or free) at DAZ.  That is everything, to include bundles.  It is hard to create content when there isn't actually any documentation available to help with said content creation.  That is why I believe they gave it away for 4 months, and have gone back to giving it (and Bryce and Hexagon away).

Maybe if we ignore the customers, they will leave us alone....

Speaking of not talking (or listening) to the customer base.  Anytime something bad happens, DAZ reps are nowhere to be found.  They don't like dealing with angry customers so they dump that off to the forum admins.  Take for example the latest website fiasco - At no point has anyone from the top of the foodchain shown up and attemped to calm the waters.  And we are going on 90 days now.  The "leadership" of Daz works under the belief that they have an infinite amount of goodwill with the customer base.  Not a good assumption, because people are starting to vote with their feet.

Of course, DAZ could have stopped the sales of Poser 9/2012 in it's tracks had they simply thought about what they were doing.  At no time in the runup to the release of DS4, did DAZ ever warn the Poser community that the new flagship figure wouldn't work in Poser.  Then DAZ was constantly stating in their forums that they had no intentions of creating a schism in the DS/Poser community.  Any post that called them on that BS was immediately deleted.

Software......

1.  DAZ is too cheap to spend money for developer seats for OSX or Windows.  How do I know this?  Because DAZ is CONSTANTLY blind-sided by changes in the operating systems.  This is why, for example Carrara, Bryce & Hexagon don't work with OSX 10.8 - If they had developer liscences (at $99 per year for OSX), they would have had access to betas, and could have made patches.  Oh wait, that leads to the next issue.

2.  The programmers at DAZ couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.  They have been developing software since 2005 and they STILL DO NOT KNOW HOW TO ISSUE A SERVICE PACK.

3.  DS4 upon release wasn't finished, in fact, it still isn't.  They simply announced that the last beta was the production version, which generated a number of WTF posts from beta testers.  It had the smell of a panic release with so many uncompleted (and undocumented functions).  Poser 9/2012 feature set (especially the ability to weight map legacy figures) appears to have spooked DAZ.

4.  Don't get me started with their other software.  I got screwed on Cararra 6, Bryce, and Hexagon (which didn't run on OSX for 4 YEARS - but DAZ would happily sell it to unsuspecting mac users without warning them that it wouldn't run under 10.5 or 10.6.

 

Genesis Part 1 - Technical Issues

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The first technical screwup was the belief that SmithMicro would rewrite Poser to use a propritary file format that was documented to DAZ standards. File formats that they are still creating, DSON being the latest.

And just who would be expected to support this?  SmithMicro, not DAZ.  I could certainly see DAZ rewriting code that just happened not to work properly in Poser ("We're adding cool features and they all work just fine in DS, you should be using that instead of Poser" will be the excuse.)  Sorry, but I lived through both "DOS ain't done til 1-2-3 won't run" and the nightmare that Win16 support was in OS/2 - MicroSoft changed the Win16 API every 2 weeks until IBM gave up trying to support it.

Then there was the tackyness of DAZ telling Poser users that they needed to badger SM to add support for genesis into Poser.  This is coming from the same folks who never added any support in DS for any Poser 5 or later feature.  Interestingly, I haven't seen a similar campaign to get other companies to rewrite their 3d apps to use genesis natively.  Not even Cararra.... Oops.

No one from DAZ has ever explained what problem genesis solves for the customer base - other than giving vendors a new mesh to remake clothing for.  Genesis solves a problem for DAZ - 1 mesh instead of 2.  Which would make since if they actually tried to fix the problems in their figures, but they seem to have stopped doing that with the release of V4.2 back in 2006.  On the other hand, there is an entire cottage industry devoted to provided fixes for DAZ figures that DAZ was too lazy to address.

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Genesis Part Duex - Sales Issues

Genesis has been a marketplace failure.  I was around when V4 rolled out the door - the DAZ gen3  products disappeared in about 90 days. 

The DAZ Gen 4 figures work in Cararra, DS, and Poser.  The genesis figure works in DS, Poser to a very limited extent, if the customer is willing to roll their sleeves up (and very, very few are willing to do it.), - I don't know about Cararra - I do know that the new, weight mapped Alyson 2 works in Cararra - I saw some shots with Anastasia in it.

Genesis came out a year ago, and if you want genesis products, for the most part, you are shopping at DAZ, because genesis products are few and far between anywhere else.  For example, Sickleyield has developed about 90% of the genesis clothing available here at 'Rosity.  Hell, Miki has more clothing at 'Rosity, RNDA and Content Paradise than genesis has at those sites.

 

Vendors -

1.  The clothing vendors at DAZ for the most part are not making new clothing for genesis, they are converting Gen4 clothing to genesis.  As I said over in one of the DAZ forums:

"I am not all that interested in buying Grace Pumps for Genesis, when I paid good money for Grace Pumps for V4, or Pharaoh for Genesis when I already purchased Pharaoh for V4/M4, or Boudoir Bliss for Genesis Female when I already purchased Boudoir Whispers for V4, or Liquid Halo On Sky 16 for Genesis when I already bought Liquid Halo On Sky 16 for V4 or the Morphing Fantasy Dress for Genesis when I already own the Morphing Fantasy dress for V4, A3, V3, SP3, Laura, The Girl, .... well you get the idea."

2.  The character creators are just recycling the same characters and look over and over - as an example, you have 3 Thorne & Sarsa characters, you have all of them.

 

 

The Website......

"The DAZ website rollout is like a living monument to the Dunning-Kruger effect."

I can't put it any more succently than that.

 

The Forums......

The moderators got much more heavy-handed once the new website flopped out the door.  Posts and entire threads were being deleted as quickly as they were posted.  For about the first 30 days only the "kool-aid" drinkers could expect their posts to stay up.  The moderators are about as unprofessional as they come.

The Platinum Club.....

DAZ needs to rename it the "DAZ Originals Club" because that is all that it is good for now.