MarioD

abacab
Could you just imagine if Microsoft acquired Cakewalk from Gibson, it could become the Garage Band and Logic of Windows!!!

NO, I don't want MS anywhere near Sonar! It may cost us in the end.
 
If you are old enough to remember Lotus 123 then you may know that IBM's take over  of 123 ended 123.  There were things that 123 could do that AFAIK Excel still can do, like make your own menus.  That might happen if MS takes over Sonar.

As a matter of fact I do remember!  My company was a Lotus 123 & Wordperfect shop for years, until we were assimilated into the MS Office collective.  That was a downgrade in my opinion.
 
I have seen tech companies taken over, and once their intellectual capital has been harvested, they are put out to pasture.  So takeovers and buyouts are not always a good thing.  Of course, my preference would be for things to stay as they are!  But in the long run some changes may be inevitable with the market forces and economy as they are today.
 
I only made this comment because Microsoft has deep pockets, and Cakewalk's dev team already works closely with the MS Windows team.

MS has had a habit of putting competition under by offering free versions until they owned enough market share. Word was free until WordPerfect went belly up and was acquired by Corel. That mentality still exists, so it would be self-defeating to assume otherwise. Cakewalk could end up being collateral damage in such a situation, especially with a Home Studio competitor being free.

I was a WordPerfect user, too. Switching to MS Word did feel like a downgrade at the time. So many advanced features were missing. Of course it's evolved since then. But I sure am getting tired of the "where'd they move that option to?" snipe hunt after every new revision.
 
Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to replace a lightbulb?
A: None. They just change the standard to "dark".
 
But it might be interesting to see what happens after they've changed SONAR's default export format to XML.
 

Sonar as a service. Doesn't that conjure up some nightmares.

Still stranger things have happened and if Gibson aren't careful they may not even get a say. But all paranoia aside what could be done to Sonar with the resources that Microsoft has at its disposal. Especially if still guided by the core Cakewalk team.

I wonder if ms will include a decent sampler.

The new DAW will be called WinCake.  Or CakeSoft.  Or WinWalk.  Or maybe something else.
 

Or MSonar?

bitflipper
I was a WordPerfect user, too. Switching to MS Word did feel like a downgrade at the time. So many advanced features were missing. Of course it's evolved since then. But I sure am getting tired of the "where'd they move that option to?" snipe hunt after every new revision.

I've been trying to study DSP lately - not a trivial undertaking on one's own, but I'm slowly making progress.  Anyway, in the process I needed something to quickly verify an assumption about DFT (discreet Fourier transform).  Turns out, Excel can do DFT - whoa ... heavy, man!

Count me as one that would be all on board for MS buying Cakewalk.  Gibson is bleeding red ink, their stock is downgraded just barely above junk rating and they have $520 million in debt and will need to restructure before mid 2018 or face filing bankruptcy.
 
Now I don't know about Cake's financials, they may have been flourishing during this time, but I don't think it's good when your parent company is about to go under.
 
Having the financial stability of being under a cash giant like MS would be good for Cakewalk.  When Apple bought Emagic it was able to popularize the Logic brand and make it exclusive to Mac to the point where a lot of pro studios have switched  over to it, because it's more producer friendly than Pro Tools and cheaper.  Plus putting Garage Band, free on every Mac put it as one of the largest install bases for a DAW, and to go to Logic Pro it's only like $200 direct download because Apple can run it as a break even business because they make profits elsewhere on other products.  Garage Band was like a gateway drug to buying a Mac and upgrading to Logic Pro.
 
There are way too many DAW's on the market, which is a niche market to begin with and the whole music retailer industry is in decline, just look at not only Gibson but Guitar center's decline.  The install base for Sonar is already behind other DAWs and even new DAWs like Bitwig are catching up.
 
Many of you have brought up good points on why it shouldn't happen, and those are valid concerns, but I'm very concerned with Cakewalk's viability being run under Gibson.

Does ANYBODY know how many different versions of WordPervert v5.1 there were? I was forced to use it for a year or so before Motorola IT FINALLY listened to its Windows (engineers) user base and moved us to Word.