Le Bump.

ampfixer
I feel the time for mourning has past. Be it Noel or somebody else, we deserve to know the way forward. If the party's truly over we should be getting info on how we can secure our investment.
 
If any of the mods can still contact Cakewalk I encourage them to do so. We need license activation codes and this continued silence is BS. Perhaps it's time for anger instead of pity. My work space is full of orphaned software and hardware that says Cakewalk on it. I feel it's time to wrap it up.
 
What do you think?

My guess is that they still don't have a plan, and it may be a while before they do with a high probability that not a lot will change until Gibson's next crisis.
 
Pretty sure that ending development was a simple financial decision to stop the debts growing. My guess is that just leaving the servers running does not cost Gibson that much, in the context of their current problems, so they probably are not in a hurry to make the changes to get rid of them.
 
Not sure how many people are left at Cakewalk but it looks like Noel is not one of them. One thing for sure is that as long as the servers can be kept up reworking the licensing code, which could be quite an intrusive change, will not be a priority. At this stage it does seem that there really is no one at Cakewalk to create the plan that we would all like to see. What happens next really is up to Gibson.
 
Biggest risk right now is that the Cakewalk staff that have been retained decide to leave and that may be the trigger for Gibson to start doing something about licensing or selling the IP (assuming that remains an option).

Gibson should not underestimate our love of this software!

If a LOT more people had bought it, and loved it, they wouldn't have had to close it down. It didn't sell enough, that's it really.

Lack of Marketing.

kzmaier
Lack of Marketing.

...and lack of focus in the right areas; lack of prioritizing what's more important; being too comfortable after 30 years of success (resting on laurels that died and they didn't notice); lack of... well you get the picture.

kzmaier
Lack of Marketing.

It really don't think it was that. I think it was a combination of having a reputation as being buggy and unstable (especially since the X1 debacle), along with the fact that it didn't do enough to cater to the young demographic. Every year there will be a certain number of people who buy their first DAW, and I'm sure most of these people are in their teens or 20's. Given Cakewalk's unsustainably small market share, they should have been doing more to appeal to these new users, but they didn't. The kids didn't want it, and mature users of other DAWs had little to motivate them to switch to Sonar. Meanwhile, of its small and mature user base, you'd have a certain number of people either drifting out of music production (or dying off!) every year, with nowhere near enough fresh blood to replace them. 
 
I have this image of the final days of Cakewalk being a little like the last few seconds of a game of Tetris, when you only have a sliver of room left at the top and the blocks (bills?) keep raining down and yet you make one last ditch effort (Momentum?) to turn things around 

kzmaier
Gibson should not underestimate our love of this software!

Unfortunately not enough people loved it enough to pay for it.

sharke

kzmaier
Lack of Marketing.

It really don't think it was that. I think it was a combination of having a reputation as being buggy and unstable (especially since the X1 debacle), along with the fact that it didn't do enough to cater to the young demographic. Every year there will be a certain number of people who buy their first DAW, and I'm sure most of these people are in their teens or 20's. Given Cakewalk's unsustainably small market share, they should have been doing more to appeal to these new users, but they didn't. The kids didn't want it, and mature users of other DAWs had little to motivate them to switch to Sonar. Meanwhile, of its small and mature user base, you'd have a certain number of people either drifting out of music production (or dying off!) every year, with nowhere near enough fresh blood to replace them. 
 
I have this image of the final days of Cakewalk being a little like the last few seconds of a game of Tetris, when you only have a sliver of room left at the top and the blocks (bills?) keep raining down and yet you make one last ditch effort (Momentum?) to turn things around 

So lots of bad decisions over a number of years...

I know its spilled milk...
 
Marketing - Get 3 Big name producers and 3 Big name artists and a Bunch of youtube videos showing these Big names showing off the Sonar qualities, and bingo Bob's your uncle.  Getting the Big names would take some work but could be done.
 
The 3 B's!!!