As popular as SONAR is, how was it not financially sound for Gibson?

Unless Gibson ditches their other pro audio lines (KRK, Cerwin Vega, Neat microphones) ... I don't see how they can say they want to 'focus on consumer electronics' more than pro audio....and....is there really much overhead to software??....*puzzled*
 I don't understand...it has GOT to have at least as many users as Cubase et al, across all versions,  right? Otoh, it bounced from owner to owner in recent years so something must've been amiss....

They mean they want to focus on hifis, radios, batteries etc. associated with the purchase of the Consumer Electronics division of Philips they made in 2014.
 
http://www.gibsoninnovations.com/en/our-brands/philips
 
Unfortunately, having publicly committed to a monthly continuous delivery model makes it impossible to move from a development mode to just maintenance mode without everybody noticing.

 
 Q: As popular as SONAR is, how was it not financially sound for Gibson?
 
A: Costs greater than turnover, therefore loss incurred.
 
Next question

fireberd
I don't think Sonar is/was as popular as we would like to believe.  As I talked to others in recording I was the only one using Sonar.  
 
The Gibson acquisition as it appears didn't do it any favors.  Face it, a company doesn't dump something if its profitable and maybe even marginally profitable.  Finally, Gibson appears to want to get on the consumer electronics bandwagon and I would be surprised if other brands they have go the way of Sonar or get sold off.

That's exactly my experience, most if not all of the Professional studios never used Sonar, though they tried it and their iterations and felt it wasn't up to Pro-Level with so many "Bugs & Crashes?" I felt like I was the only one to believe in it? Even though Sonar "Crashed many times" I stayed with it. Since moving to S1 with heavy recording schedule "Rock Solid" and became 2nd nature surprisingly fast, "Very Nice DAW". 

Wibbles
 
A: Costs greater than turnover, therefore loss incurred.

I think you are absolutely correct and there is no better way to put it.
 
- Some (not all) staff probably made good money.
- Think about where they are located (in Boston) that's big money to rent.
- Latest program "Momentum" probably didn't sell half as much as was expected in the first few weeks.

I guess they've succumbed to the corporate greed business model, perhaps long ago, far from its simpler luthier roots, and we're all victims of the digital age. Despite all its benefits, it may have been nicer back in the day when if you wanted to collaborate with another studio all you did was give them the tape, but a lot of time and work involved. Nowadays I guess its a more cutthroat survival of the fittest's proprietary system, and making it more difficult to share projects between different DAW manufacturers. Albeit we do have midi, OMF, VST, wav standards, so if you know what your doing, and familiar with the various DAW's and keep this in mind when using any DAW it may not be that difficult to collaborate between various DAW's conventions. With the constantly and quickly evolving digital technologies its hard to ride the wave if you dont adapt quickly to new digital/computer technologies, and have the resources to totally scrape older technologies, and start anew taking advantage of new technologies.
Cakewalk was one of the company's to be on the forefront of these audio/music based technologies, and was a leader that inspired others to try and equal and better them, even up till the present with Sonar being on the forefront of adapting to touch technologies, in direct collaboration with Microsoft.
 
I guess what makes it the most sad is to think that Cakewalk's legacy may not continue to survive and evolve.
 
Cheers

THambrecht
We had a lot of sound engineers in our studio that laughed about SONAR.
But as they saw what we do, they were absolute surprised. They all said, that there ProTools or Logic cann't do that.
They all remembered very early versions from SONAR about he year 2000 and never had a look on this software.
 

I think that's about right. Sonar had a poor reputation that it couldn't shake off. Just visit other forums like Gearslutz to see what others thought about it without ever using it. 

For all the backlash that Roland got at the time which I thought was grossly unfair, Roland tried to embed Cakewalk into their ecosystem by selling Sonar as part of the range of audio/studio gear like audio and MIDI interfaces plus control surfaces.  They also introduced hardware which they branded Cakewalk, all in the name of cross-pollinating the two companies and thus giving Cakewalk exposure in different markets with a brand that go back to the late 60s!
 
Those are the facts that happened so one has to ask, if it was successful, why did they sell them to Gibson?  It seems that actually, it wasn't successful and according to the way some have interpreted the published figures for Cakewalk, it was making a loss thus they sold it to Gibson.
 
Now, Gibson have had a lot of flack over this but I believe Craig Anderton regarding the fact that they really wanted it to work and were going to embed it into their Tascam ecosystem, which by the looks of it, with an over-saturated DAW market, seems to be the way to get the buy-in, give a basic version away with your hardware and demo it at every opportunity working seamlessly with your hardware!
 
So another question, what happened to the brand of "Sonar by Tascam Professional Audio Software" which was going to be set-up, why didn't that happen?
 
Even though it seems that Gibson have purchased a number of companies over the years and then closed them down, perhaps they've had a habit of buying struggling companies with the hope that adding them into their ecosystem, they can turn them around so in this case, I don't completely blame Gibson until we know more facts!
 
From my perspective, very sadly this looks like an old battle which went badly wrong - the VHS vs Betamax war!  We all know that Betamax was the superior system but the marketing of VHS won the day.  I see Sonar in this light because now having had a look at other DAWs, its become very evident that Sonar with its Skylight GUI was superior to any other DAW and the technological capability of Sonar outstrips most other DAWs in one way or the other - ARA, MIDI, VST3 support, ProChannel, the recent quality of VST's which got bundled, no hardware dongle and the list goes on and on.
 
Because Cakewalk hasn't been completely shutdown, I'm hopeful that this is Gibson leaving one last remaining door open so that there is a possibility of this phoenix somehow rising up again however hard and find its way because I don't believe there is any other better DAW out there.
 
Cheers to the Sonar phoenix - "let there be light"...

tenfoot
Another factor could be that a fair percentage of those many users may well be quite happily running older versions, from which there is zero revenue.

There is also zero revenue from those using the current version on a lifetime S-Plat licence who choose not to purchase any of the much-vaunted add-ons.
 
I still fail to completely understand the benefits to GibWalk of such a business plan over the previous 'annual upgrade' model.

As so many others have pointed out, SONAR never really had the "pro street cred" of PT and others.
Financially, Avid conditioned its users to a cost of doing business that was higher and reinforced that notion that this is the cost of playing with the big boys. Pros and novices alike bought into that.
 
SONAR, on the other had....had ( has?) users that whine about $99 upgrades and complain about not getting their "lifetime" of software updates. Apparently that's not a very lucrative market 
 
Which begs a question: Knowing what you know now, how many of you might have happily paid a little bit more if you knew it was the difference between keeping SONAR alive and having it shuttered?
 
<raises hand>

sonarman1
Despite not covering the huge mac userbase cakewalk was successful. They weren't doing excellent in the market but they were doing fine.

Not sure I understand this reasoning. "Successful" is a subjective term, but we can for our purposes define it here as something which at least manages to stay afloat and make a profit. If Cakewalk had been successful it wouldn't have been sold and offloaded twice, and there would be a line of investors interested in it now. 
 
The problem Sonar had was that it was not attracting enough new users. Its user base is aging, and that's why in my mid 40's I almost feel like one of the "young'uns" around here. There's nothing wrong with that per se, and it's resulted in one of the wisest, most knowledgeable and mature audio production communities on the internet. Unfortunately that does not translate to a healthy revenue stream. 
 
That was Cakewalk's problem. It's not to say that Cakewalk couldn't have turned it around - of course they could. But not with a soulless husk of a company like Gibson cracking the whip. 

cakewalk hasn't got a big market share, never did.
many daw makers aligned themselves with hardware makers.. pretty much had to..
 
I found it over engineered to be honest.. e.g. drum maps or how reason rewire was implemented.
the staff are / were capable.. but they never addressed the elephants in the room .e.g scoring.
 
I dislike aspects of other daws also. e.g. studio one, isn't so great for my midi sound stuff.. and cubase is a bit too eager to ask for cash,and I've never seen the update on sale.. but is better with the midi stuff... reason should have stayed a rack style thing.. even some of their own artists mix down in a daw.
 
it would have been nice if it had worked out better with roland I felt.. but it just came across cakewalk was writing drivers for them, and roland were try to flog hardware.
 
presonus did that better in the sense of the faderport is functional outside studio one.. but really shines when used with studio one.
 
it's the balance of .. is it cheaper to build a new daw from scratch ... or re-use sonar's code if someone bought it off gibson. people like Noel obv. know it inside out, and I'd not be surprised if he was "jaded" with the whole pro audio thing, to do something else. It's a bit like when your hobby becomes your job.. it's different.
 
the market is crowded, thats for sure. maybe better to do something with VST's etc. where the userbase is far bigger, but obv. end prices are smaller.
 

How many here think the name CakeWalk might have had a little something to do with their demise? That name always causes me to cringe a bit. If you had a mega studio trying to attract business would you want to be known for using software named after a child's game?
 
From what I have gleaned from the reddit posts and Craig's posts here, it sounds like they were rudderless. They would create a course and set off but midway to their destination would come up with a different course and start off again. Kinda sounds like they were stuck in the middle of the ocean, as it were, going nowhere fast. They never reached their goal of profitability as they were going in circles. Look at Momentum. It was practically dead before it was even released. It was given one week or so to make or break them? smh
 
It also sounds like their sales group was completely incompetent.
 
As to Philips, has anyone actually bought anything Philips that wasn't a light bulb? Where I work, we were offered discounts on philips shtuff. Some people bought their TV's but there were problems with them. We learned to stay away from Philips. Maybe they do better outside of the US... All-in-all, it sounds to me that Philips is just a 500 million ton anchor that is going to pull them to bankruptcy.