There is no reason to assume they haven't sold it. They may not have sold the Cakewalk company but they may have sold the intellectual property - source code, patents etc. If that was sold to someone else to develop and rebrand, the new owner wouldn't owe the free lifetime updates - they die with Cakewalk and the slate is wiped clean for the new owners. So there is a lot of value there for any potential buyer even without the Cakewalk branding.
 
Also, we can only speculate as to whether Cakewalk was losing money for Gibson. It's more likely it was the other way round. I think Gibson would have to at least try to sell any assets associated with Cakewalk including IP at the insistence of their creditors.

Frankly, I'd live with the IPR being sold on and a new SONAR being born - personally I got enough updates from the lifetime licence to be happy with it, and having the option to keep on using SONAR and having my projects just work going forwards is worth spending something (we are all likely to need to spend something at some point for another DAW anyway)... if they would just provide a sensible cross-grade, that would be awesome.
 
To me, there are some companies that make sense - some of which may seem odd, but which might be viable:

• Applied Acoustics - they seem to have been close to Cakewalk over the years anyway, and seem to have been working hard on their products over time - would be a potentially useful diversification?
• Arturia - might seem an odd one, but having to grown from software to hardware to recently adding audio inputs, obvious next step and is a hardware as well as software vendor?
• Magix - the really odd one, but they have Acid and others already, and recently took on Sony's VEGAS and Sound Forge and seem to be pushing ahead with them !?

Why don't we all reach out to them all (and others you might think of), as well as putting pressure through social media, etc. on Gibson - and for that matter Philips, as this debacle could well affect Philips' global brand - to actually try to sell it on.

35mm
Also, we can only speculate as to whether Cakewalk was losing money for Gibson.

True, but we know they were losing money under Roland and it seems sales have declined from that point.

35mm
It's more likely it was the other way round.

IMHO, it is most likely that BOTH have been losing money, but the end came when Gibson needed more capital and the banks or private investors insisted on serious cost cutting.  The key indication (pretty obvious, actually, for people who have been in such situations as either executives or investors) is that Gibson evidently approved the Momentum acquisition and product launch very recently -- only a few months ago.  That tells me Gibson was inclined to let this run longer and an external force changed that.
 
Have a look at this article;
https://www.thestreet.com/story/14280618/1/gibson-guitar-may-default-if-company-can-t-refinance-its-debt.html
 
Notice how many others in the music instrument business are also struggling.  Everybody from Steinway (which owns Selmer-- most of the band instrument business in the US) to Guitar Center.  This is much bigger than Cakewalk and Gibson.  There are too many products chasing too few customers.

I would better that offer" say $2" Will Noel work for me?

AndrewLMacaulay
 
Why don't we all reach out to them all (and others you might think of), as well as putting pressure through social media, etc. on Gibson - and for that matter Philips, as this debacle could well affect Philips' global brand - to actually try to sell it on.

I would imagine it would have already been sold and maybe the buyer approached Gibson with an offer in the first place. I'm thinking Microsoft who it turns out is developing a DAW for windows to compete with Apple's Logic. Cakewalk was working with MS very closely in recent times. It wouldn't be very practical for MS to start development on a DAW from scratch. It would be far quicker, more efficient and far less cost to start off with an already established, well developed, Windows only product and redevelop and rebrand that.

cparmerlee
...is that Gibson evidently approved the Momentum acquisition and product launch very recently -- only a few months ago.  That tells me Gibson was inclined to let this run longer and an external force changed that.

It's funny though, did you notice in the promo video for Momentum that when they mention connecting it to your DAW, it wasn't Sonar they showed but another DAW (can't remember which one). That struck me as very odd at the time.
 
It would have taken a long time to design and develop it. Launching it when they did might not be so crazy. Gibson wouldn't have told Cakewalk not to develop anything new. They wouldn't have given Cakewalk any indication of their plans at all.

35mm
It would have taken a long time to design and develop it. Launching it when they did might not be so crazy. Gibson wouldn't have told Cakewalk not to develop anything new. They wouldn't have given Cakewalk any indication of their plans at all.

It is my understanding that the Momentum product was developed by another company that sold out to Gibson/Cakewalk recently.  I may have that completely wrong as I see no press releases to support that.

35mm
Also, we can only speculate as to whether Cakewalk was losing money for Gibson. It's more likely it was the other way round. I think Gibson would have to at least try to sell any assets associated with Cakewalk including IP at the insistence of their creditors.

The thing is this. Unless there’s a buyer so absolutely desperate to acquire a subsidiary of a company in severe financial difficulties they will grab it now rather than risk not getting it, any potential buyer is quite likely to wait until the parent, Gibson in this case, is in an even worse financial situation than it is now.

Because whatever price might be accepted by Gibson now it’s probably higher than what would be accepted in the future. Especially if the parent is declared bankrupt. At that point the receiver may be happy to take a low offer just to get what cash can be scraped together.

So there may be someone interested in buying Cakewalk/the intellectual property, just not yet.

35mm
There is no reason to assume they haven't sold it. They may not have sold the Cakewalk company but they may have sold the intellectual property - source code, patents etc. If that was sold to someone else to develop and rebrand, the new owner wouldn't owe the free lifetime updates - they die with Cakewalk and the slate is wiped clean for the new owners. So there is a lot of value there for any potential buyer even without the Cakewalk branding.
 
Also, we can only speculate as to whether Cakewalk was losing money for Gibson. It's more likely it was the other way round. I think Gibson would have to at least try to sell any assets associated with Cakewalk including IP at the insistence of their creditors.

Good points.
 
I have held the belief that Cakewalk lost the boat way way back before Roland bought it.
 
I have been with Cake since Dos 3, and watched as things developed.
 
The late 80's and early 90's were critical for market share. Protools was getting the rep as a pro level tool, and the others were for weekend warriors. (I didn't agree with this reputation but it was that was going on).
 
Cakewalk was really only marketed in the United States. I remember Europeans on the forum asking to buy, but were pushed away. Eventually Roland became the agent for sales outside the US, and Roland treated the software very passively. It remained difficult to buy it in Europe.
 
Meanwhile, Cake stuck with Dxi while the world went with VST.  Cake didn't want to pay the licensing, I imagine. So we had to deal with a really bad VST wrapper.
 
Cubase took over from capturing the worldwide market from being based in Germany, and having native VST.
 
Also they got good endorsements.  An equation in the music business is no endorsements = no sales. It would really help Cubase when some star would report in and interview that he composed the hit in Cubase.
 
Then Roland bought the company and continued its attitude of using the DAW to sell hardware. But by that time Cubase was the DAW on most musician's lips, or Protools if you had a big budget.  I figured Cake had an uphill battle since then. At a point in time that was critical to take over the market the corporation was lackluster in imagination for marketing.
 
Not to mention Roland's shameless lack of support for all of that hardware they managed to sell.
 
That is my memory of what happened. If I am wrong I would like to know. Cake has been part of my life for 30 years.
 
 

kday
Either Gibson got something up their sleeve, or they are just totally selfish to the faithful customers.

I do not think Gibson knows what Gibson wants.