From a vendor point of view, the progress of updating to newer formats and structures will always lag behind the upgrades and improvements in software... it's just a fact of life... it does take time to learn how to utilize the new features to incorporate them into a product properly (which is often somewhat more complicated than it is for an end user because we have to learn the new features first as a user and then as a content creator)... A good vendor should always be working on improvements to their skills and tools but making content is much more complicated than simply using it once its made... we have to learn the new features, and, the new tools needed for content creation... then learn how to properly implement these changes into the products we make so that said products will actually work the way they're supposed to.

    Yes it is nessessary for vendors to continue to improve their products and to incorporate new features, but to completely drop backwards compatability in favour of making sure that all the latest features are taken advantage of will also alienate a large protion of the marketplace... DAZ is an example of this. They chose to make products that could only function within DS (or in Poser using the DSON Importer) so that the main new features could be used, but in the process alienated a large number of long-term customers... particularly Poser users who now often have difficulty getting products to work within their chosen program. As we are all aware this also caused a massive community backlash when many users found that they could no longer use content they wanted to buy or had already bought. I can't and don't speak for DAZ but one would assume that this had a detrimental effect on sales... at least in the short term...

For larger sites like here at Rendo, and even at DAZ, the narrowing of the customer base and associated backlash is a bad hit but manage-able... for a small 3rd party vendor that can mean the difference between having business and being out of it entirely so they would need to be somewhat more cautious in the choices they make in implementing new features and supporting new upgrades... and more deliberate in their planning on doing so...

    One also has to consider the enormous pressure on vendors to not only offer new features but to continually keep pressing out new products and to meet continuous customer demands and requests. Again... not as big an issue if you are selling through a big site with a huge customer base but if you're a lone artist or a small site it can be a almost impossible task just to keep up... you have to work almost 24 hours a day to keep new products coming out and to meet new requests and demands, plus learning everything you need to know about any new features to be considered. It's a constant trade off between time, need, and productivity.

Of course, much of this would be less of an issue if companies would provide proper documenation of new features and make it easier for those of us on the user end to learn how to use and implement them... It's this lack of documentation that causes a great part of the lag in adopting new features into products... since much of the documentation has to come from the end user instead of the companies making the programs...

    The last thing a vendor has to consider is that by adopting the new features of one program he (or she) may be eliminating an entire customer base by rendering his/her products useless in another program entirely (DS versus Poser functionality being a perfect example). This potential loss has to be weighed against the potential gains. By continuing to use older file formats and structures, you can maintain a certain basic level of cross-compatibility between programs. In some other programs and markets this wouldn't be an issue, but the Poser/Daz community is a bit of a special case from a vendor perspective...

I'm not arguing against changes or different ways of doing things... i'm simply pointing out the many things a vendor has to take into consideration when making products. Just like there's no "Make Art" button in Poser... there's no "Make Content" button either (beleive me there are times I wish we had both)... It's a long and involved process to create content and lets face it, if everyone could do it we probably wouldn't have sites like Rendo to shop at...