Attached Link: http://poser.smithmicro.com/

Anytime a business starts to disassociate itself from one of its products, it's not a great thing for that product. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It sure as hell doesn't represent a firm commitment to that product's welfare. A couple years ago, last time I looked, Poser was on the Smith-Micro Product page and now it's not. That's a pretty solid statement that Smith-Micro, at it's top levels, sees the future of the company lying in a different direction.

I'm not interested enough in exactly how Poser is being shifted/realigned within Smith-Micro to do any further digging. If anybody has any info or links, it would be interesting to see them.

For anybody that felt terribly clever about finding Poser in the SM store, please read the part of my original post that said, "It's still in the store. Links from the store can eventually bring one to the main page for Poser." I'm posting the link I found here because it's a much more comprehensive link than the my.smithmicro one. This appears to be the link maintained by the Poser development team whereas the my.smithmicro link isn't very informative.

Just because there are press releases and Poser activity doesn't mean the program is healthy at Smith-Micro. If memory serves me right (not that I'm betting on it), didn't E-Frontier buy Poser from Curious Labs a month or so before Poser 7 was released? The company, that owned the 3D program Hexagon, was advertising a new release and was accepting pre-orders just before selling it to DAZ and never released the update on their own. The update was released by DAZ.

Companies operate on many different levels and one hand doesn't always know what the other is doing. I have no inside information on whether or not Poser employees had much lead info before their unit was bought and sold multiple times. Everybody just keeps doing their job since there's often no way of knowing what is going on. Typically, only the top people at a company know what's really being done.

I even had one uncomfortable job where I was stuck in the middle of having to let a division of the company continue working on a project that I knew full well my management was talking about taking away from them and giving to another division to start from scratch. When the coup finally happened, my management didn't even tell me and I got waylaid at a meeting by being the only person in the room who was unaware that the project had finally been moved. Even though I was the project manager for the project being moved, my management was doing things behind my back as well as behind the backs of the division that was happlily proceeding as if the project were theirs to complete. It was something I had some inside information about, but I didn't have all of it. Guess who got all the blame when the new division picking up the project found out that all the behind-the-scenes wrangling came out of their time to do a six-month project such that they only really had two months to do it and failed? I'll give you a hint--it wasn't the upper management bosses that kept everybody in the dark.

Just because things look like "business as usual" doesn't mean they are. Does a Poser presentation at SIGGRAPH mean Smith-Micro is committed to the program?--Probably no more than Hexagon's owners, taking pre-order money for a new release of the software, had any intent of releasing it. Smith-Micro could be in the middle of selling Poser and still be at SIGGRAPH. All that press release means is that somebody representing the company is presenting information at the event. That has no bearing on whatever behind-the-scenes things are going on, if any.

Seeing Smith-Micro remove Poser from their product listings is akin to having your name taken off your company's organizational chart. It may not mean you're fired, but you can pretty well bet you're not on the short list for a promotion. Sometimes a product spun off to a satellite part of a company is a good thing because it often grants the spin-off more autonomy. It's also done to make it easier to get rid of that product. There are times when this kind of change allows a product to shine and there are times when it's the first step to divesting the company of a product they're no lonter interested in. I don't which case is happening here.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon