More on Poser 7 and e frontier Product Acquisition
I've received a lot of questions on the forums, on my voicemail, and through various emails. I'm going to try to address some of the concerns this evening as best I can.
First although Content Paradise was not mentioned in the press release, it will be part of the acquisition and remain along side Poser. It will continue to operate as CP and will continue to see improvements as it matures. The product teams in general will be staying with the products and that includes Manga Studio and Anime Studio. Manga studio as you know is published by e frontier and developed in Japan. It will continue to be developed in Japan and we are awaiting a localized version of 4.0. I'm not sure about Shade, Motion Artist, and Amapi as those are e frontier Japan products. Whether or not Smith Micro will distribute and publish those, I do not know. Support will continue through the same channels as it does now and if there are changes to any of this I will let everyone know as soon as I can.
I believe (again this is my blog so this is my own opinion) the reason Aquazone was mentioned in the press release so heavily, was that Smith Micro has a long history of very successfully publishing and distributing the product in the U.S. Around 4 years. It's been part of their consumer division for that time and is important to them. However, I have not asked anyone at Smith yet. Poser and the other products are new to them, hence the reason that the product teams are essential. We have the know how to create the products and they have distribution channels that we could not have taken full advantage of as e frontier.
You can continue to access customer service and tech support through the same channels and pretty much everything will stay the same for now. The e frontier site will remain available until the transition is complete and by that time all product downloads and customer needs will be met from Smith Micro. There's no timeline on that yet.
Again I understand there's a lot of speculation and the press release was somewhat unclear. It was obviously not intented for the Poser community as it did not address your concerns.
Thanks
If you're new to blogging as I am, you can leave comments by clicking here. I really am interested in your thoughts.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: More on Poser 7 and e frontier Product Acquisition.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.poserpro.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/31
Feeed-mE! 
Thanks for the update, Steve. It makes me feel a bit less concerned. Although having seen Poser going from CL to EgiSys to EFrontier I should be used to Poser changing owners ;-) Good luck with the new company :-)
I'm glad to hear that the product teams will be going with the products. However, I'm anxious to hear about whether the products are going into maintenance mode or if they're going to press for ongoing development. That is, when will Poser Pro 7 ship? Was there a Poser 8 in the works, and if so, will it be finished at Smith?
BTW, I've been a user since the early Poser 4 days, and one of my frustrations has been the constant ownership shifts. It has made it very difficult to develop any contacts on the development/support team. Any support questions beyond registration seem to disappear into a deep, dark rendering bucket, and it seems impossible to get the direct contact information for any employees.
In particular, I am a graphics programmer at [big graphics company name redacted], and I have often had detailed technical questions, bugs, and/or suggestions that I've wanted to communicate, but it's been impossible. I have hopes that this will change (and your blog is a good sign), but I'm also pessimistic -- there's always so much confusion in these transitions, I don't expect the communication levels to suddenly improve. And yet I still hope to be proven wrong.
Well, I think it is a bit like raising children. When we did (they're grown now), we tried to avoid the "mistakes" our parents might have made - only to add our own specific ones.
So Poser changing from one owner to the next - maybe we can hope for certain improvements (service in general, for one), and maybe some new insights from the soon to be owners.
Selling the stuff should not be the problem (talking about Poser content), but maybe some fresh thoughts might surprise us all.
Tons of "maybe's", sure...
To read the press release and go over to Smith Micro's site only amplifies the concern that the Aquazone purchase is really what they were after here.
Still, early days, mind you I've dealt with this company in the past and have been less than unimpressed with them.
I do hope I'm wrong here but I'm not seeing warm and fuzzies from them yet in spite of their stated hope to grow the product. And they do seem more interested in enterprise stuff than end user hobbyist products which is really where Poser made it's mark.
ttfn
John
Thanks for this information on e frontier product..
hi steve--
i'm fascinated with poser and i'd love to find out more about the poser user base. how big it is, what most people are using the software for, more about the seemingly (?) massive cottage industry around the product.
is there some good reference or websites on that stuff? might i drop you an email sometime instead?
thanks!
roger walco