It almost seems as if the current situation between Curious Labs and DAZ is somewhat similar to what happened between Apple and Microsoft before Windows 3. At that time, Apple had the killer application with their operating system. Even today, allegiances are very strongly polarized between Mac's operating system and Windows. Before Windows 3, there was no contest that the Mac was a clearly superior machine for desktop publishing and graphics work. The best graphics applications were made for the Mac and the Amiga. Way back then, Apple could have ported their operating system to the PC world and probably have killed the then nascent and only marginally useful Windows operating system. At that time, Apple was in the business of selling computers and the operating system was just the unique application that made their computers the hardware to get (at that time, Apple made $1000 profit on every $6000 machine sold--an almost unheard of profit margin). Micosoft eventually released a more functional visual operating system with Windows 3 that quickly buried DOS and stemmed the tide of people and businesses switching to Macs and eventually gained a stranglehold on the vast majority of computer systems. For whatever reasons, Curious Labs has stayed out of the Poser figure business. Before Poser 4, Poser was mostly an art assist program. A figure could be posed and lit and brought into a paint program to realize a work of art. The resolution of the figures was marginal. There wasn't a lot that could be done with them and there wasn't much third party availability for Poser content. Poser 4 upped the ante, providing figures with a much wider range of emotional morphs and, as primitive as the P4 figures seem today, a much more realistic set of figures and props. It was Poser 4 that created a demand for more compatible products and opened up marketplaces for that content. Curious Labs sat back and watched this content market grow without making any attempt to be one of the content vendors. To some degree, it wasn't a bad strategy. The more Poser content there was, the more interest there would be in purchasing the program that would allow that content to be used. Although I haven't read any detailed accouts about what caused DAZ and CL to take diverging paths with Poser, it's clear that the fashion in which Poser 5 was released created a rift between the two companies that is culminating with DAZ creating their own posing software. DAZ has never supported Poser 5 other than where they had to so that they could continue selling their content to Poser users. DAZ is working diligently to release Studio so that they can control the direction of their Poser content. It wouldn't be surprising if the failure, of the Poser 5 figures to become the new Poser figure standards, was the signal that DAZ had taken something important away from CL. If DAZ owned the standards for Poser content, DAZ had a foothold for controlling where those standards could go. The fact that DAZ refused to support Poser 5 hurt Poser 5 sales. I've read more than one instance here of people who bought Poser 5, but never used it. There seems to be a very large Poser 4 base that has seen no need to upgrade and part of that reason has to be that DAZ has basically dismissed the capabilities of the newer program. CL is sort of like Apple and DAZ is sort of like Microsoft. DAZ is in the process of creating what they hope will someday be a competitor or replacement for Poser. The fact that DAZ will be giving away the base Studio software will ensure fairly wide usage if it proves to be a functional alternative to Poser. The real money is in the content. The average DAZ customer spends more per year than they ever did on buying the application. There's no information that CL is reacting to this change in the marketplace. They are getting ready to release Poser 6 and I suspect that it will be a comparative failure to earlier releases. From the information CL has released, Poser 6 will not contain any new features. It will mostly be a major upgrade for the engine to allow it to take advantage of the rendering capabilities of modern graphics cards. It's probably going to be a bomb because CL will probably price it as a brand new $300-$400 application with a $150-$200 upgrade price. A good proportion of Poser 4 users never upgraded to Poser 5, so they couldn't care less that 5's been improved. Poser 5 users will likely be resistant to a new product that is more Poser 5.5 than Poser 6--it's basically the product they were hoping 5 would be--stable and faster. If DAZ Studio becomes a capable application, and will likely be the lead for new figure innovations. Why pay a full application price when there's nothing new to the program when there will be a free program that does the job? There's intereting things in the Poser future. I wonder if history will dictate the directions for the future or will it just be repeated?

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