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.

Gibson's management style and philosophies could kill a merged company consisting of Google and Apple.
 
I wouldn't trust them to park my car.

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

They're $500 mil in debt for a reason.  They make products that aren't competitive and the management cant figure out how how to fix things and at the same time not spend as much.
 
So the only avenue left is to somehow increase stock price.  They cant do it by actually MAKING things, so the only thing left is to say that by doing xyz they will generate more growth.  Thats the only thing that you cant actually (yet) measure, so it's easier to "make stuff up" about how doing xyz will blacken the skys with some new consumer product.  Lather rinse repeat.  Always keep moving, dont let them actually see the smoke and mirrors.
 
Its a generic trend all over the industry.
 

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. 

Sonar wasn't as popular as cubase. People who use it love it but many don't choose Sonar, for many unknown reasons its name is not popular among the pro audio community. Being around a few people in the industry I can say for sure its less popular. Most people in the industry dont implement any novelty in their choices. Its always about what daw all of their friends use, what daw their fav producer use. Or in most cases what daw they taught them in the school they went . Sonar doesn't score good there. The audio industry is all mac and sonar is not even a choice. Despite these sonar was doing good. It was in no way in its death bed. Its unfortunate to go in the hands of Gibson. 

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"...

Reposting here. This is the facebook fanbase of these official facebook pages.

Cakewalk Soft 143k
Presonus 218k
Pro Tools 140K
Avid 185K
Steinberg 203K
Ableton 622k
Ableton Live 253k

This can by no mean help us know the market share but these numbers do matter. Ableton Live is for sure having a huge userbase. Protools despite low fanbase is used a lot by pros and is sold along with Avid Hardware. That makes lot of profit. Ableton also sells hardware controllers. So I guess Ableton and Pro Tools has huge market share. 

Presonus is doing well and they are good at selling hardwares as well. They must be making very good profits. 

Cubase is heavily priced and still has long standing followers. Steinberg might not be doing excellent business as Ableton and Avid but I dont think they will go down anytime. If at all any such situation occurs I am sure its loyal millionaire producers will fund it. 

Despite not covering the huge mac userbase cakewalk was successful. They weren't doing excellent in the market but they were doing fine. The problem is they had no expensive hardware to sell along with it to make business. And very unfortunate to land in the hands of Gibson 
 

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.

guitz
....is there really much overhead to software??....*puzzled*

There is most definitely a ton of overhead in software. Let's use your cited examples to compare. Let's take Cerwin Vega for example. They want to build a speaker cabinet so an engineer designs it and provides all the spec required for manufacture. A few prototypes are built and tested. Perhaps some tweaks are implemented and tested. And then you're done. The speaker goes into production development stops and the engineer goes on to other projects. 

You do all the same stuff on the software side except development doesn't stop when the project goes into the production phase. The engineer remains married to that project full time because inevitably things will be broken right from day one. And of course Windows updates come out monthly which can cause issues needing to be patched.

From an engineering perspective, software is much more costly than hardware.
 
 
 

I don't understand...it has GOT to have at least as many users as Cubase et al, across all versions,  right? 

That has not been my experience. I don't know the numbers but based on the people I know and those I've met, the Sonar user base pales in comparison.