bdickens
Exactly. It's the guitarist, not the guitar.

Three young gents came into my friend's music shop with a guitar to trade in for a new Fender.
 
My friend, who is an excellent guitarist, looked it over for possible damage - then plugged it into an amp and began to play.
 
As he played, the eyes of the three gents got bigger and bigger.
 
After my friend's last double-handed hammer-ons came to a wailing, dramatic stop, he asked:
 
"The guitar's in good order. So which Fender did you want to trade it in for?"
 
The leader of the group said, "Ah. No, it's OK, we don't want a new guitar. We changed our minds".
 
The guitar was obviously not the problem.

Great post by Euthymia.
 
I'd already been in the biz for 10 years when I first saw Mosaic, but I dismissed it at the time, thinking it was just a BBS for eggheads. I'd similarly dismissed Windows 2.0, because it couldn't run existing software. I remember seeing my first Mac, which a customer was excitedly showing off, and thinking "grade schools will love this, but it'll never have a place on corporate desks". When the first smartphones came along, they struck me as gimmicky toys trying to do many things, but none of them well ("no way that'll replace my digital camera").
 
When I started using RISC-based and massively parallel and distributed systems, with their potential for cool stuff such as real-time animation, I thought "now, there's the future!". My Sun Sparcstation was way ahead of anything Intel, Apple or Microsoft were up to at the time. I was looking forward to everyone having something like that in their homes. You could even record and edit high-fidelity audio on it. 
 
My point is that my own informed prescience doesn't have a great track record. It's just not always possible to evaluate new approaches within the framework of the current paradigm. Too many assumptions about what works and what doesn't, based on what's working today.
 
Heck, I thought Rap and Disco were passing fads. I was, however, spot on when I predicted the demise of parachute pants and leg warmers.

jpetersen

bdickens
Exactly. It's the guitarist, not the guitar.

Three young gents came into my friend's music shop with a guitar to trade in for a new Fender.
 
My friend, who is an excellent guitarist, looked it over for possible damage - then plugged it into an amp and began to play.
 
As he played, the eyes of the three gents got bigger and bigger.
 
After my friend's last double-handed hammer-ons came to a wailing, dramatic stop, he asked:
 
"The guitar's in good order. So which Fender did you want to trade it in for?"
 
The leader of the group said, "Ah. No, it's OK, we don't want a new guitar. We changed our minds".
 
The guitar was obviously not the problem.

You guys are turning this Post/Thread something completely different.
What does anything being discussed here talk about Sonar as a problem?

People want to see movement and trajectory of a product, which has nothing to do with the current state of the product.

Sure, horses can take you many places and the landline phones are perfect, they are never the problem and I am sure you prefer them over cellphones. May I assume you don't have a mobile phone because the Phone booth works? 

It is about ideas and innovation and movement, sure I can use Windows XP and Tape Machines but how does that break in the profits of where the industry is?

Euthymia
Microsoft, a well-funded company (as is Meng's), came along and bought up the slightly out-of-date Mosaic and started giving it away for free as Internet Explorer.

Can you please explain to me where Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for Free?
When did this happen?

Audioicon
Can you please explain to me where Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for Free?
When did this happen?

Back in the mists of time Windows did not come with a web browser. Not only that, Windows had no built-in support for TCP/IP either, the provided networking being MS-only protocols (NetBEUI).

When MS decided they really ought to provide their own browser - for the Windows platform only, and with various “features” that were non-internet standard*, they made IE available as a free download for existing Windows license holders and included it in the standard Windows distribution package.

So if you had Windows you got IE with it. Every version update of IE was free. Very similar to the relationship between Safari and OS X/MacOS. Back then Windows, even the flagship “professional version” NT4, had zero copy protection. Which no doubt helped MS gain a dominant position because rather than pay for Windows people borrowed disks from friends or work and copied them.

And when, excluding paid-for Windows updates, did you ever pay for an update to IE?

*There is good evidence that some of IE’s quirks and non-standard behaviour were deliberate - MS strategy in the mid-90s went from “the internet is a passing fad that we can just ignore and it’ll go away” to “the internet isn’t going away, so how do we absorb it and re-configure it into a proprietary on-line service with MS owning the IP and the software needed to access it?” Outlook Express, a mail client again given away with Windows which broke email stanrads so badly that even MS’ paid-for mail client Outlook couldn’t cope with much of its output was part of the same strategy.

Euthymia
And that godawful name! GOOGLE Chrome? "Google" sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of a toddler.

Could be worse. It was nearly named “Backrub”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#History

tlw
When MS decided they really ought to provide their own browser - for the Windows platform only, and with various “features” that were non-internet standard*, they made IE available as a free download for existing Windows license holders and included it in the standard Windows distribution package.

So reading your passage above, how was or is this free?
If I say to you, "Buy my album and get my previous album free, am I really offering you  a free album?"

My point is, IE was available only on purchase applicable systems, so it is/was not free.

CBB is actually free.

Audioicon
 
So reading your passage above, how was or is this free?
If I say to you, "Buy my album and get my previous album free, am I really offering you  a free album?"

My point is, IE was available only on purchase applicable systems, so it is/was not free.

CBB is actually free.

A better analogy might be buy my record player and get a free album. Just because a product requires an OS to run does not make it part of the price you are paying for the OS. Alternatively any product offered as part of a purchase of any other product or service can not be considered free, since its cost can be considered a discount/inducement on the primary purchase. 
 
In Europe Microsoft paid a big price for bundling IE with Windows, and versions of Windows for sale there did not automatically include IE after a finding of anticompetitive practice. You could still download IE for free and run it on your system, but it would not automatically install with Windows. So was IE free in Europe but a paid product in the US?
 
If BandLab has not found a way to monetize the "free" distribution of Cakewalk by BandLab, then I would expect the product will have a short happy life. If they have, then it follows that something about your acceptance of the free product is making them money. You are logically paying something, if only your information and membership in the BandLab subscriber base that can be used to increase advertising or other sources of revenue. This is not to say that there are no truly free products available, where a generous and otherwise self sufficient developer has donated the product and cost of distribution to the world, but making these fine distinctions about free vs paid is beginning to lose meaning in the current commercial climate.

A product as powerful as Cakewalk has to be taken seriously by the industry, whether free or not.
Just because support is not mentioned in ads for hardware or software doesn't mean it won't work. In most cases, it probably will. 
I don't expect the major studios to trash their current set-ups and use CbB, though, but they certainly could try it out.
All they have to do is get over the 'it's not Pro-Tools' mindset. 

57Gregy
I don't expect the major studios to trash their current set-ups and use CbB, though, but they certainly could try it out.
All they have to do is get over the 'it's not Pro-Tools' mindset. 

And to be fair, their "Apple is God" mindset - which is ironic, given that many people feel Apple has purposely devalued intellectual property so they could sell more hardware.
 
Note that Komplete Kontrol doesn't do full support with Pro Tools, only Cubase/Nuendo, Logic/GarageBand, and Live (of course, most of it works in Sonar, Studio One, Samplitude, etc.). NI is a savvy company that makes more money than most, if not all, DAW companies. Yet they didn't bet on Pro Tools.
 
Logic and Studio One have done more than just chip away at Pro Tools, whose stronghold has traditionally been on the Mac.
 
It's all very up in the air right now. It's uncertain whether Apple's desktops are going to be as fabulous as they claim, which also assumes Microsoft doesn't have some surprise Surfaces up its sleeve. Surface Studio was a wakeup call. If Microsoft gets their hardware act together and doesn't get overly distracted with being a cloud services company, CbB will be in the right place at the right time for Windows users if Noel keeps making the kind of tweaks he's making.