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Oh, and you also cross-sell cakes to your cellphone customers and phones to your bakery customers, thus expanding the markets for both businesses.
There needs to be a 'These members say thank you to PhilW for this post' button.
Many business projects are not mutually exclusive.
In business, there is a cost of raising funds. To raise a dollar through debt markets costs some percentage in interest. To raise a dollar through equity markets costs a share of any profits going forward. To raise a dollar through retained earnings is a dollar not returned to the owners through dividends (so also a cost). The point is that to invest a dollar, the dollar has to be acquired and paid for somehow. If there are two potential projects that could have a dollar invested, the task is ... compare the return for each project to the cost of raising funds for that project.
Each project is evaluated on its marginal revenue and its marginal cost (which includes the cost of raising the funds). Raising a dollar to invest in project A does not necessarily preclude paying the cost to raise a dollar for project B. The formula for return on investment (ROI) and internal rate of return (IRR) and those other business concepts are constructed as aids to marginal decision-making.
BUT - you can't always evaluate projects in isolation, what about externailities or spillovers or synergies or any other term people might want to use?
Sometimes, there are spillovers from one project to another so it is difficult to evaluate them separately. So, a business has to consider how a dollar spent on one project affects costs and revenues of another project. For example, in isolation, every dollar spent on Studio development is a dollar wasted because Studio is given away for free, but Daz would still have some revenue from Poser users even if Studio did not exist. In isolation, Studio is not worth any development money. Ah, but Studio has positive spillovers. A dollar spent on Studio affects content sales.
OK, does Carrara have content sale spillovers? If not, why not? If so, how much? And if so, could those spillovers be captured more easily by investing in something else (such as the Studio/Hexagon/Bryce bridge or buying a 3rd party program?). These are all things to take into account. I suggested 4 categories of revenues that could be affected by a dollar spent on Carrara. My evaluation is from a distance, so I might be right or I might be wrong. There might be other factors, or a factor I outlined might actually net out to zero. Happy to discuss. But it is hard to explain my point better if I am merely told that someone does not understand, and because that person does not understand, the concept must have been irrelevant.
BUT - sometimes middle level managers are effectively given a fixed budget so from their point of view the amount of investment dollars is fixed and so they must compare the rates of return of two projects, not each project on its own ROI.
YES!!!! - Mid-level managers do not necessarily have the big picture incentives of top management. See my point about maybe the niche of Carrara could be filled by Daz at lower cost by either improving the Studio bridges to Bryce and Hexagon or buying anoither 3rd party program. So there can be tension between the incentives of the top level managers whose profits depend upon the full impact (including spillovers) of each potential project evaluated as if they were not mutually exclusive, and some middle level managers who might see a dollar budgeted for someone else's department as a dollar lost to their own.
If people answer the three questions of the OP, some additional information related to Carrara-related content sale purchases might be revealed. If and how that would be used by Daz mid-level managers in their internal turf wars, and Daz top leadership in their struggle to take into account cross-effects of different projects, is beyond the knowledge of folks outside of Daz management. But answering and reporting the questions gives (biased in a statistical sense) information to Daz managers that they might not have. No emotion. No sentimentality.
RE: Tufte - great stuff - check it out. Maybe there would be greater mutual understanding if we supplemented our written words with images that used concepts explained by Tufte.
RE: the new forum and my longwinded and jargon-laden rants -
There seems to be a delay in the appearance of some of the posts. Once again, Phil made some of my points much more succinctly, and without the jargon.
- investments are not necessarily mutually exclusive
- one source of funds is retained earnings
- there are spillovers between some projects
But, it did not seem to appear in my thread until an hour after his time stamp.
PhilW, from across the pond, I salute you.
No problem - thanks for your more in-depth explanation.
I will be very interested to see how this pans out in the end.
I hope I'm wrong, and DAZ "sees the light".
We'll see.
Now for the magic question. How at DAZ3D is going to receive this information? I don't thin top management at DAZ 3D is reading forum threads.
Yes, that's how it works. And thanks again to Chohole to get it working recently.
Same for me. All of my 48 pages (up from my earlier answer of 47) of DAZ purchases are used in Carrara. I do not use DazStudio. I am now shopping more at other sites due to the lack of new Poser (and Carrara) format items here at DAZ.
Thanks Phil,
Back to the poll.
I have almost two pages..... All I buy is for use in Carrara. I have tried using DAZ 3D but when I found I could not model in it I lost interest.
msteaka
I recall Head Wax mentioned that the data was to be presented to DAZ soon. And I would hope that somebody at DAZ is interested in the feedback from many customers who have purchased hundreds and even thousands of products. I was once the liason for my company to a consultant who was hired specifically to gather feedback from our customers. It wasn't cheap, and my company's management was very involved in the preparation of the consultant and very interested in the results.
Head Wax - you have mail!
Earlier today I sent an email summary of this thread to DAZ Marketing, having discussed it with Head Wax. My email said the following:
Hi DAZ,
I have been asked by people in the Carrara community to make you aware of a thread in the Carrara forums which set out to demonstrate that Carrara users buy lots of content from DAZ, and that therefore it would be beneficial to look at a modest development to Carrara to integrate G3F.
I apologise if this is raking over old ground, or if this is already under consideration, but as you know, in the absence of any firm information, people will make all sorts of assumptions. So please don't shoot the messenger!
The thread is here:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/58113/daz-abandons-carrara-users-because-we-don-t-buy-enough-content-how-many-pages-do-you-have-in-your-p/p1
but there was quite a good summary posted which goes as follows.
There have been around 60 respondents to the thread and between them have over 2,500 pages of content as per their Product Library, which equates to 100,00 products. This will of course include freebies, but if you assume that 50% of these are freebies (and 50% paid) and that the average price paid is $10, then that equates to half a million dollars of revenue for DAZ. Most of that content will not be Carrara-specific, and may not even be marked as compatible with Carrara, but as Carrara can use most DS and Poser specific items, then users are using it in Carrara (and most respondents confirmed that Carrara is their main 3D program).
This will have been spread over a number of years, but also, this is the tip of the iceberg, there will be many Carrara users who do not frequent the forums and yet still buy content. The underlying message is that Carrara users represent a not-insignificant revenue stream.
Now I have no idea how easy or hard it will be to bring Genesis 3 product compatibility to Carrara, although there are reports of being able to load G3F into Carrara and use the bones but not the morphs (I have done this myself with a Collada import), or the morphs but not the bones (reportedly in an older build of Carrara 8.5). I have a feeling that it would not require a massive development to get a reasonable level of compatibility, and that would open up Carrara users to make many more sales for DAZ.
I hope this is a useful perspective and that it can be passed on to the right decision makers in DAZ to make an informed decision on future developments.
Thank you for your assistance on this.
Kind regards,
PhilW (on behalf of the Carrara forum users who contributed to this thread)"
And I have received this reply, which I have confirmed that I am OK to share on this forum:
"Thank you for your email. Yes, we are very mindful of the Carrara community and their support and contribution to the DAZ community and revenues. We take all actions very seriously, and haven't failed to consider these folks. I cannot give you more information than that officially right now.
Thanks so much for your email, and don't worry... We love the messenger :) "
While this actually says very little directly about Carrara development, I also feel that it says quite a lot between the lines. I leave it to each of you how you interpret it, but I was heartened by the prompt response and positive tone of the reply.
Standing Applause... Well done... and thanks!
- Don
Thanks Phil...
now to render an image titled 'We Love the Messenger'
get cracking
we need better smilies!
Yes it would be great to have a heap of new features too, but I think that is another topic - and has been well covered elsewhere. This thread was triggered by the lack of compatibility with the Genesis 3 figures and that has always been the main thrust of this thread, as you can see from the very first post.
Actually I can remember you saying that facial bones would be fantastic, and Genesis 3 delivers that technology, so you could be happy just for that.
di•plo•ma•cy /dəˈplōməsē/ n. The art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a large rock.
I will admit to being a horrible cynic, but I can't help thinking that they're stringing along Carrara users for as long as they continue investing in Daz's content in one form or another, and if that cash cow suddenly dries up (pardon the metaphor, Sockrates), Carrara gets the axe.
I'm not sure when it became a G3-only issue. If you read the OP's post it was about DAZ abandoning Carrara users because we don't buy enough content. And the latest G3 incompatibility was just one more indication. I guess it was just another of those "read between the lines" things that apparently I'm not real good at.
But hey, it certainly won't be the first time I totally misunderstood the intent in this forum.
Thanks for taking the lead, Headwax and PhilW. Great initiative no matter how the numbers work out. Appreciate your efforts.
RE: complete overhaul of Carrara, or merely small marginal changes in compatibility for the latest released figure? Here is one more business link saying the same thing in yet one more way.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marginal-analysis.asp
For those that are tired of me making the same point over and over again, I can only say that I keep getting confronted by the same point over and over again. But from now on, I will merely link to others describing marginal decisionmaking for me. I can keep finding basic 3rd party descriptions of marginal analysis as many times as folks assert that profit is maximized by not looking at marginal changes.
Excellent and well done everyone. Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread and special thanks to Headwax and Phil for the support to the community.
I have avoided jumping into the fray here, mostly because I did not want to denigrate DAZ or discourage the fine efforts of the community to bring attention to the fact that Carrara users do indeed buy content to be used in Carrara and would not purchase content that does not work in Carrara.
Please note that I did respond to the three questions early on.
Now that Phil has forwarded this message to DAZ marketing, and the message has been acknowledged and not dismissed I feel it is appropriate to chime in.
As Phil indicated no company is immune from making poor decisions, and that includes DAZ.
For example:
DAZ purchased Bryce software and proceeded to let it wither and die.
DAZ purchased Hexagon software and proceeded to let it wither and die.
DAZ purchased Carrara software, and by all appearances (albeit, a bit more slowly), it is their intent, or they are content, to let it too wither and die.
Does anyone truly feel that it was a good financial decision to invest in new forum software (that they introduced with no warning in the “middle of the night”) that resulted in a great deal of angst from their user base and the expenditure of their highly limited resources? What was the profit motive here?
I am quite certain that their resource expenditures would have yielded more profits by ensuring that their new generation of models would work in Carrara, thus generating additional content sales. Certainly if they would ensure that all of their content would work in Blender they would sell more content as well.
Everyone makes mistakes. What is truly important is learning from the mistakes and avoiding making the same mistakes over an over again. If everyone in every business knew exactly what they were doing, businesses would not fail. We all know that this is not the case.
DAZ is not infallible in their decision making process and does not always make the best financial choices. No one is right 100% of the time.
Early in my career I worked for a large toy manufacturer. This company had the opportunity to purchase the rights to, at the time, a new set of toy figures – Star Wars. There was insufficient time to bring the products to market for the all important Christmas buying season, so they did not purchase these rights.
Someone at another toy company decided to purchase the rights and formulated a much derided plan to sell boxes that did not contain the toy but instead contained a mail-in certificate for the toy. The toy would be delivered in near future. Most experts thought that this was a ridiculous idea. The company went on to make millions and millions of dollars on these Star Wars figures. Did this make everyone else who thought this would not work an incompetent idiot? NO.
The same people at the same toy company that passed on the rights to Star Wars, decided to bring a different toy to market – Rubik’s Cube! Their stock went from $3/share to $14/share in a matter of months, and of course they made millions. It is important to know that not everyone thought that bringing Rubik’s Cube to market was a good idea.
I would be ecstatic if DAZ would continue to develop Carrara in a meaningful way, but like many others have stated in this thread and elsewhere, if they do not I still feel I can get a lot more mileage from Carrara now and in the future – I just won’t be buying content from DAZ that does not work in Carrara.
Kakman - Good post, I have pretty much the same feelings. I have less interest in G3F than in continued availability of Carrara compatible Poser format content, but "works in Carrara" is the common theme.
Phil and Head Wax, many thanks for all the effort. I'm not optimistic, but at least hopeful.
Wow, thank you for doing that PhilW :)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And thank you to all the Carrara users (and others) who responded so positively and intelligently to this thread!
It's great to belong to such a wonderful community.
I think, with everyone's help, we have presented a pretty sound financial case to DAZ outlining why they should continue to support Carrara development.
PS PhilW - thank you for the PM, unfortunately I cannot access it, nor any of my other PMs. Hopefully just a forum glitch, or my browser playing up.....
Use the gear icon on forum pages and go to "Inbox" -- it's not the In-Site Messaging on the My Account page in the store.
I think that the response from Daz is hopefully encouraging. And I would like to See G3 as its an evolution in technology. At the same time though I want to feel like the premiss of the thread when it was started that DAZ hasn't abandoned or plans to limp out till everyone gives up on Cararra. Its a fantastic program, and it does so well that bringing some modern, improvements (not tring to get into specifics), fixing things and refining things that are there to make it just a step or two easier, better (stronger faster million dollar man inserts here). (I mean Fenric had to write a Hide Skeleton plugin and smart content doesn't give nearly the responses that it does in Studio)
We still don't even have HD mesh for G figures. Now its not that I use it or even need it but... I just would like a small sense of Daz actually cares and isn't sitting around laughing or giving the roll the eyes feeling like the unwelcome family member they want to keep in the basement. It comes when people like Fenric who wanted to extend Carrara to Applink 3d-coat but can't because Daz doesn't release those parts of the API's (I believe he wrote to daz would have to go back into the threads), the author of 3d-coat offered compensation for the applink plug in. I am glad we have Go Z (I even own it though I don't own or use Zbrush cause I haven't been able to afford it yet).
It feels from the daz website and its focus shows no commitment to Carrara (or mention, just log out and go to the main page and poke around). We can't even get a Carrara search for products as a catagory, and as had happened before not all products in DIM have the word carrara in them.
I am glad they responded and a marketting person saying what they did. I want to be excited I go to learn and use Carrara not wondering half the day if its worth the time and I should look to something else.
sorry this is a bit rambling, if I said something offensive It wasn't ment that way, and when I am not exhausted I will try to edit and fix anything I may have inadvertantly done.
Thanks Mike
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
and now I can get the pm's :) thanks for that
Milo said:
Carrara is still a wonderful program, with or without G3 support so it is definitely worth the time to learn! Carrara isnt going anywhere as long as it is installed on your Hard Drive ;) I believe there is also a third party cloth plugin close to the end of it's development cycle that could really expand on Carrara's toolset - fingers crossed.
Steve K:
Thank you.
Head Wax:
Thank you for starting this thread and all your efforts.
PhilW:
Thank you for bringing this to the attention of DAZ Marketing.
I, too remain hopeful - but I am realistic in my expectations as well.
thanks kakman :) good to see you back!
Thanks Phil for taking the time to contact DAZ. My feeling is that the focus is more and more on DS and less and less on Carrara. With the release of G3 it seems that DAZ is trying to make its content more appealing to a wider base than the DAZ community. I'm anticipating a significant upgrade to DS soon which will allow it to transfer content to and from other programs so it becomes more like a pipeline into other markets. Even though Carrara has a lot of great features that make it more advanced I don't see how it would fit into that strategy. This is just speculation so perhaps that's not the direction DAZ is going in but I don't think I'm just picking up this theme from some of the comments in this thread.