cparmerlee
Beepster
rfreeze
Are the 12 month periods set, or do they start/end randomly based on when each user buys in?
I ask, because in my mind random would keep the Baker's marketing guys from dangling carrots on the other side of the line. This would give me more confidence in the continuous nature of the advertised feature release process.
The 12 months starts the day you buy in and ends 12 months later so the idea is a perpetually dangling carrot. You can see what's coming up next on one of the Cake pages but I don't currently have the link open to post it. Right now it is showing a drum replacement tool, some FX chain thingies and something else that I'm forgetting right now.
Rfreeze makes an interesting point. In the familiar model, Cakewalk (and most other companies) begin working in earnest on a new release after the most recent release is stabilized (I realize there is some overlap, but the basic model is true.) And this drives a natural development and marketing cycle that tends to be somewhere in the 1-2 year range between releases. That does cause revenues to be very "lumpy" which might be a problem for some companies.
With the model that Cake is trying to present, there wouldn't be such discretely defined release cycles and they surely hope to make the income less lumpy. But modern software development still favors major releases, especially for products as complex as SONAR. For them to make the subscriptions continuous beyond the first 12-month free period, they will have to do at least minor releases to the core product before that 12 months is up. otherwise, people will correctly conclude that nothing really has changed and the subscription plan is just an opaque way to raise prices.
I take the company at their word that they really do want to change the actual pattern of delivery and this is not just a marketing tactic. They have 12 months to demonstrate that.
Yes. This will be a trust based system and as I was saying in the CH yesterday I think if you trust Cake (and they prove worthy of that trust) it'll work. If you're a paranoid skeptic (which I usually am but not so much with Cake) then it won't.
Still though at this very moment I'd say they've added enough cool stuff to make the initial buy in right now worth it. It is essentially X4 with whatever drops down the pipe in the next 12 months... which in the old pardigm would be X5.
The Bakers will have to hustle though to retain trust which they seem more than enthusiastic about so I'm getting a good vibe about it. I do also get the feeling they MAY (or more likely Gibson) had been wanting to make it solely a subscription model a la Adobe but the backlash to the survey question was too severe. So now we get the best of both worlds.
I think if they continue making it more useful to rock/guitar dinosaurs like me as they have been but also start focusing on adding things to please the EDM/Ableton/FL crowd they could really dominate the market. I used to do some security type stuff for dance hall type parties and knowing a lot of how those guys roll they're into the whole "drop cash to sustain as you need to to maintain the lifestyle/image" so monthly scripts would likely be a boon in that regard IF they made the program a little more DJ friendly. A stereotype perhaps but it's what I saw. Most of those dudes would rent their flashy tables and gear, borrow records, whatever so I could easily see them just wanting to snag a program for a month for gigs without dropping a whole wad all at once.