I think anyone who is prepared to learn one of the larger packages should just learn Blender. Blender users always have the advantage of not needing to recoup the costs of a package like Max or Maya. As was predicted many years ago, Blender is crushing the competition (which is no surprise at all). My prediction for the future is that the likes of Max and Maya will slowly but surely die off, and those companies will be forced into creating plugins for the mighty Blender.

That said, I do genuinely want to see Poser succeed regardless of what happens with the other packages. There's an attraction to Poser the others just don't have, so I'd hate for it to die. They really do need to look into the future a lot more than they appear to have been doing. The problem with large campanies buying-up products like Poser is that they all do the same thing, they basically milk it for what they can and ditch it. Wolf's comment is stereotypically dangerous, it's the same one that has been accepted for far too long and is why Poser isn't up to date with it's animation tools.

Wrong attitude.

If they don't hire someone who understands why the animation side is vital to a product like Poser, they will continue to fail as people flock to programs like iClone. What the Poser developers should be doing is asking themselves how they can not only bring back the custom they've lost to Reallusion, but also how to steal Realluison's customers away from them - customers they never had in the first place (due to the sorry animation situation).

The alternative is to sit on their asses kidding themselves that animation has nothing to do with people flocking to iClone. I'm sorry to break this to everyone but I'm afraid it does. I mean it's not as if Reallusion were sucking-up the customers like a sponge though it's old render tech, now was it. No sir, it was sucking-up the customers cause people want to animate instead of been tied to stills all the time. People often want to tell stories with their figures in the form of a movie, a short, an "animation" - so it's about time Smith Micro got it's ass into gear and realised this.