Reply To: The Best Service Website Is BACK!!! [The Deals are Back!!!]

[Peter DeLegge]

1. On superabbit said

I haven’t seen any rumors posted here, only questions and speculation.

A LOT of people have personal stakes in the continued existence of Best Service.

For starters, it is a chilling reminder that all of these license validations that require a handshake with a server depend on that server being around for a long time.

When designing and engineering products, the consideration “what becomes of our customers if we go out of business” seems never to be on the table. Who wants to think about that or bring it up?

One of the things that I respect about BandLab is their keeping Cakewalk’s old registration server online over these many years. It would be nice if they also got rid of Cakewalk’s zombie website, but….forget it, Jake, it’s BandLab.

-Erik

Yep. It is—absolutely—a reminder of the risks of any proprietary sample library platform. I don’t have any Best Service Engine Player libraries. So that hasn’t been an issue for me. But Best Service should realize that this situation may concern people about buying Best Service Engine Player libraries for a long time. If Best Service gets their site back up next week, people will still bring up what happened when someone posts that they’re considering a Best Service sample library that uses their Engine Player. If I were considering a Best Service sample library that ran on their player (I wouldn’t have as much of a concern with their Kontakt libraries), this would certainly be a very significant factor.

As far as Cakewalk, yeah, I do appreciate that they haven’t gotten rid of that either. Although, from the looks of it, and my emails with their social media manager, I really can’t imagine that they’re going to be keeping all of that stuff, or their “legacy forums” — as their social media manager refers to them  –much longer. I don’t think that they’re having a lot of success with their Cakewalk Sonar subscription model. Keep in mind that they were recently valued at $450 million, so they need to focus on products that make money and shed ones that don’t. My guess is that they’ll abandon it within the next couple of years.

For anyone keeping score. I had predicted that Waves would reverse course on their subscription-only model in no less than three months and was ridiculed as clueless for that opinion by one frequent poster at the Cakewalk Forum. This market loathes subscriptions. They’ll only accept them in certain cases (like distribution services). Every software company wants to go subscription-only, the problem is, in this industry, consumers don’t want to like subscriptions. So,  to those who say that subscriptions are inevitable. I disagree. Companies that sell software don’t decide that, consumers ultimately do and if consumers use the power of their wallets, they’ll win.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

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