Clean sheet of paper

Earlier today in another thread, someone posted a link to an interview with Cakewalk founder Greg Hendershott from late last year. I can't find the post or the thread and don't remember who it was, but it was an interesting read. So whoever it was, thanks for posting it. For anyone who missed it and might be interested, here's the link again.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/11/12/interview-cakewalk-founder-greg-hendershott-20-years-on/

This part of the interview was particularly interesting, where Mr. Hendershott talks about the need to sometimes take "a clean sheet of paper and say, how would we design it today? Which is not to say that Logic and Cubase and SONAR are bad, but they definitely [represent] a certain philosophy of how things should work. For a lot of people that’s perfect, but it’s not the only way. So I think it’s really fun and refreshing to see people take out the clean sheet of paper."

I think we're at that point now, where what's needed is a new design drawn on a clean sheet of paper.

Here'a bit more of the interview (although the entire thing is good.)

Were there times when you did a clean sheet, or “reboot”, of Cakewalk’s software? SONAR, I suppose was a kind of reboot, right?

Behind the scenes, pieces of the engine, going from Pro Audio 9 to SONAR 1 there were still huge tracts of code behind the scenes that were basically the same. But we definitely took out a clean sheet of paper with the user interface, and behind the scenes pretty big chunks of the engine and code did change significantly to support other technology. For us, coming from DOS to the first Windows versions was a pretty big change. That was an opportunity to rethink some of the feature set and user interface. And then going from those Windows versions of Cakewalk Pro Audio to SONAR was another opportunity. And then doing Project5 was another opportunity.

The increased closeness of Cakewalk's relationship with Roland is another opportunity. It makes it possible for CW to start and continue "clean sheet" development of a new project without having to release it less than fully formed as they did with Project5.