Reply To: Free Sonar Tier

[superabbit]

Aww, Peter, I was just yankin’ yer chain.❤

I’m fully aware that you have some serious chops as far as market analysis and that you weren’t talking based on a fallacy. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage your skills. I didn’t actually disagree with anything you said. I was trying to goof on the idea that BandLab’s handling of the Cakewalk was fathomable on any level. I’m the one doing the speculating based on my own armchair hunches, not you.

Your analysis is based on actual data and observation. My “analysis” is pure speculation based on my own personal experiences and following the software business as an insider and outsider.

One thing I do differ with you on is that you seem to be working from an assumption that someone, anyone, at the BandLab home offices cares a whit about Sonar and Next’s share of the DAW market. I’m with SoulfulKeys on this. I think the desktop DAW’s are there so that BandLab can tout the membership as being all that you’ll ever need in your musical career. They’re in the business of selling memberships, not DAW licenses. I’m not sure they’d measure Sonar’s “success” in terms of how many people use it or not. Sonar succeeds if it helps sell memberships. To that end, it should seem like a reasonably full-featured DAW. If its presence in the market helps that, then it will be encouraged.

I’d be surprised if the free tiered Sonar doesn’t come with some button(s) you can click to purchase a full membership. If they do this, I just hope it’s not too intrusive.

Caveat: this is all just speculation on my part. Maybe they do want Sonar and Next to grab market share.

Question I have for you as a pro: you say that Adobe have been “successful” with their subscription model. Is that true? Are they continuing to grow as far as revenue? Market share? I’m sure they still have the pro market nailed down as far as photo editing. I don’t have access to that information the way you do and I’m curious.

One thing I have been observing is that viable alternatives to Photoshop and other pieces of the Creative bundle are starting to gain (here’s that word again) traction. Digidesign and Avid threw their weight around with Pro Tools, resulting in their competitors slowly but surely grabbing more and more market share until we now have a situation where Pro Tools is something that seems to be used by mostly legacy users and people who have to use it because they work in Hollywood.

They especially lagged behind on composition-friendly tools, which left room for competitors to overtake them in that area. Among people who compose film and TV music, I think more of them use Cubase or Logic.

Here’s some of my career experiences: I was a software QA engineer at a variety of SF Bay Area software companies, including Informix, Macromedia (pre Adobe), Berkeley Systems, and The Learning Company.

Later I started my own successful guitar stompbox company. My products were reviewed positively in Guitar Player magazine in the US and Guitarist magazine in the UK. Unfortunately, burnout set in and I haven’t sold a pedal in over a decade.

The product that I worked on at Macromedia was xRes, which was intended to be a competitor to Photoshop (as if). It was, I believe, the first such editor to use proxies to be able to edit very large files that couldn’t fit in the memory restrictions of the time.

It was working on xRes that gained me insight as to the challenges of trying to keep a host compatible with plug-ins designed for a different host. xRes was supposed to be able to use Photoshop plug-ins. So when I observe plug-in format politics, it’s from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. It’s why I agree that if your DAW is acting weird, the first thing to do is turn off all plug-ins and see if it stops acting weird.

Macromedia was famous for acquiring and killing once-viable programs. They got it right from time to time, such as their acquisition of Future Splash, later Flash. I was there when that acquisition happened. But they killed xRes, Deck, Fontographer, and more I can’t remember. Most of what was left was nuked by Adobe when they bought the company.

Right before I bailed on Macromedia, they got a new CEO who knew nothing about even using computers. I know this because I had moved into IT and was sent down to his palace in Atherton to help troubleshoot his home office. So, as you mentioned about the importance of people at a company understanding the market, they had tossed this into the bin. This guy knew how to please Wall Street analysts and that was it.

At that point I swore never again to work at a publicly traded company. When my next employer was sold to an international conglomerate, I took the bonus and left, later starting my audio electronics company.

Now I play games, fiddle with my DAW, observe, and, thanks to this forum, speculate. Maybe I’ll make something else happen someday, but for now, (mental) health issues have me pinned down.

-Erik
___________
superabbit.bandcamp.com

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