Reply To: [not a deal] CbB no longer support activation after August 1

[peter]

On patrickwichrowski said

They could provide a legitim reg key for current Cakewalk By Bandlab users. Everybody would be happy and trust would rise. Even if they offer this at some cost, people would like to have a backuped working program to fire up at any moment.

 

They just killed Cakewalk in windows 7. Thats why Reaper is becoming more and more interesting for me.  Why not do as ToneBoosters that in suport page you can download the old plugins that fully work in old systems with no restrictions.

 

All that these guys in Cakewalk management do is to irritate the previous loyal customers. It’s so unbelievable that seems to be some kind of internal sabotage.

BandLab doesn’t give away its retired DAW software to use because the point was never to give away free software altruistically; it was to use it as a means to bring people into the company’s ecosystem, where they would — hopefully — buy things (loops, plugins, sample libraries, services, musical instruments, etc.) . Forcing the former Cakewalk by Bandlab users to adopt Sonar pushes them into their actively supported freemium product. I think the strategy wasn’t well thought out for the former Cakewalk users / DAW users. Bandlab has done just about everything they could do to alienate them and make them question BandLab’s commitment to Sonar. Anyone still making projects in Sonar right now should understand that the future is very uncertain for that DAW. Bandlab has burned too many bridges with the market to make a comeback. It’s clear that it’s failing.

Consider this. Bandlab was recently valued at $425 million. They have around 100 million Bandlab software users. I would bet that they have far less than 100,000 users of Cakewalk by Bandlab plus the paid subscription and free versions of Cakewalk Sonar. I would not be surprised if they had less than 50,000 — far less — Cakewalk Sonar subscribers. Even less than 20,000. It’s hard to justify continuing to develop that product if they don’t see growth, and I doubt that they’re seeing growth — in fact, I’d put money on it that they’re seeing significant decline. The bottom line is, they’re certainly not going to offer options for those using Windows 7. Bandlab has only one product that doesn’t run on Windows and Mac, Sonar, and they have stated that they have no intention to create a Mac version, and yet a significant percentage of their Bandlab customers use the Mac. That’s exactly why Next is compatible with Windows and Mac. Just this fact alone about Sonar tells you that Bandlab’s management doesn’t foresee Sonar as a tool that’s critical to their brand portfolio.  But the mismanagement of Sonar is easily a brand failure. There’s nothing tricky about discerning that. The only question is how long before they bail on it and try something different. Next is the product that makes sense for them. But I don’t know agree with the logic in branding it Cakewalk. That was — I won’t try to soften this — dumb. It should be renamed Bandlab Next.

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