I am a Website designer.  Adobe took over Macromedia's Dreamweaver a long time ago.  They made a great program (that was only getting better) mediocre.   Not a big fan but as a designer but I am using some of their products. 
They do a good job marketing, and yes, their business model seems to be sound.  I just don't know how much they put into R&D.  How much better in the current version of Photoshop than Photoshop version 6 or7?  They do a great job making something look shiny.  
So if you want to put a skirt on Sonar Platinum and pay monthly, Adobe is the company that should buy Cakewalk.

ok guys i called them and they just laughed down the phone at me.
 

Noooooo. Have you ever noticed what Adobe does to companies they acquire? They absolutely gut them. They will fold certain fearures into their products and cease development. Remember when fireworks was the standard for making web graphics? Remember serious magic had a better keying program?

Adobe's business model works for one reasin and one reason only, they have a monopoly on the one product every serious visual artist, video editor, fx artist, etc uses; Photoshop. There is no yrue competitor and has not been in over 20 years.

dcmg
The flip side of all these complaints about Adobe is this:
They run a very profitable company; they're growing, they have navigated the changing digital landscape perfectly. From a strictly business standpoint, they are the opposite of how Cakewalk was run.
An Adobe-owned SONAR would likely be safe from extinction.
 
That said...why would they bother to buy CW?

None of the other conpabies Adobe vultured were safe. They desyroyed those brands very quickly

Fireworks became superfluous once adobe took of Macromedia as they could simply roll it's features into Illustrator and Photoshop to streamline the range and make it more useful. I'm a frequent user of Premiere, After Effects and Illustrator and in fairness, they are really solid, highly functional, class-leading software now. Expensive though.

I'm with the "no" votes on this one. While I do use Photoshop Elements and find it to be decent, I hate Premiere. It's counter intuitive (to me, anyway) and is just difficult to use. But most of all, I hate the "subscription" model Adobe keeps trying to force me into. Maybe with a DAW I could justify the money, but like I said in another post, I ran Sonar 8.5 on an old XP machine for years and turned out a ton of really good recordings. I just don't need to spend $200 to $500 a year for some cloud based software, when I have already coughed up a couple hundred bucks for a program that can reside on my own machine and run without needing to connect to the internet.
 
Plus, I just don't trust Adobe to leave Sonar alone, or to actually improve it. I don't know who I would like to see acquire Cakewalk/Sonar, but not Adobe. Just my opinion.

Software as a service and subscription model is where everyone is heading, not just Adobe. Again, not a likely scenario either way as Adobe isn't likely to pick up an asset that is bleeding red ink.

Will never rent from Adobe. Glad I was able to purchase all their products when they for sale. Same with Microsoft as well!

Adobe?
 
f..no.
 
Microsoft mebbe, NI, perhaps (Lord knows they need the help), but Adobe?.. leeches.