Mystic38
This is a totally pointless thread.
 

of course it's not pointless, discussion helps people deal with it, you don't have to take part

LJB
Lack of proper marketing on a grassroots level.
Lack of a Mac Version.
 
I'll bet my money on those two reasons as those have always been the observations from my clients.

The Mac thing may have been true at one time, but honestly FL Studio has been a top selling DAW for years with no Mac version and Mac sales have actually declined in the last two calendar years.
 
I think Cake should have taken a page out of what PreSonus did and make a limited functionality freeware version of Sonar, or Music Maker and then struck a deal with Microsoft to have it bundled with Windows, and then when activating the product you get email addresses and offer deals for subscriptions and upgrades to the full product.  Cast a wide net and then gain sales.
 
The Mac version thing was a lost cause from the beginning.  I was really upset they went down that road for the 3 or 4 people on the forums that were begging for a Mac version.  it's about core competencies, you are not going to compete with Logic on a Mac.  It's a $200 program on the Apple app store, and Apple can run it at break even or for a loss.
 
Going back to mid to late 2012, Sonar had the best touch screen functionality of any DAW on the  market, and nearly every Windows based laptop comes with a touch screen.  They never really capitalized on that, because Studio One and Cubase were outselling them in the PC market.

I blame Gibson: They are the Parent Company, they owned the acquisition.


Assuming I was acquiring a company, wont there be an analyses period? To go over the books or over the entire business apparatus to determine how things will operate. Cash flow/Risk.

Based on everything I have read, it appears, Gibson acquired Cakewalk and simply abandoned it but not maliciously, rather due to incompetency, meaning it was up to Cakewalk to survived or sustain longevity. 

Would you acquired a company which was having issues such as what we know without plans to clean things up, it would not have ended this way.

Yes, I agree some of the issues was with Cakewalk, but Gibson was the parent, they acquired Cakewalk and the baggage.

This whole thing to me appears like this:

I am going to get a dog but how the dog eats and how it gets potty trained is not my business concern or prerogative.

Suddenly, the dog is soiling the carpet, I am going to throw it out.

Afrodrum

JClosed
...
 
It's sad Sonar ended this way, but it does not surprise me. They had their chances, but kept primarily targeting the wrong market and at the end failed.

Sonar perfectly targeted me. I suppose I Am a wrong market 
 
 

They targeted me as well.  It's not that we're the WRONG market, it's just that we're a SMALL market. 

Multipart answer:
 
The short and simple part is the direct blame for current handling of situation is all on Gibson.  I doubt this decision was made overnight and they strung customers along with a model that was bound to cause mass panic when things collapsed.  
 
The long term blame to a degree falls on Cakewalk.  Cakewalk has a loyal following, but has been like that old relative that everyone respects because of history and name recognition.  The reality always found a way to manifest,  How many of us are used to any controller or product listing every DAW but Sonar for compatibility.  I have only ever purchased one controller that had Sonar as a preset out the box. Even mags like Computer Music tend to focus on other DAWs exponentially more.  This was occurring BEFORE Gibson acquired.  Cakewalk was acquired because it was struggling and a drag on Roland (who also botched things). 
 
I always thought the huge mistake Cakewalk made was not recognizing the shallow and trendy nature of their business. They made a great product that a generation of young producers/beatmakers/ musicians are unfamiliar with. 5 of the current top 10 songs on the Billboard hot 100 are made in FL studio. Cakewalk made a great product that was not great at the trends in pop music.  Correction to myself.  Cakewalk could do some of those things but they were not intuitive and Cakewalk never seemed to go out of their way to fix that image.  Even products that were well regarded like Z3ta and Rapture suffered from image issues despite being vey powerful. I would put Zeta+, Dimension Pro and Rapture up against any DAW's stock synths.  Even sound designers that know Cakewalk synths well gave up on making presets for them .  Xenos makes presets  used on hit songs , but abandoned Zeta because the demand was not there. This is a monkey see monkey do business. It's sad but insane to ignore.  Damn near every project hip-hop studio in America got those awful KRK monitors after videos showing  one  of Jay-Z's producers in studio with them (actually they were a much more expensive brand that had similar yellow woofer  but KRK benefitted from mistaken id) while creating a song. The lack of association with big name artists pretty much excluded them from the very large wannabe market that many amatuers fall under.  There are a lot more kids trying to be the next Deadmaus or 808 Mafia than there are kids dreaming of making the next  great progressive rock song.  No disrespect to any genre intended.  Modern music trends can be annoying, but from a business stance, it is madness to ignore those trends.  When the Katie Perry's of the world started making number one songs with trap music as backing , and the pop scene became a hybrid formula of Disney kids making watered down RnB/pop with featured rapper of the moment, Cakewalk should have responded.  I work with many young aspiring teens and young adults who love contemporary music and not one of them have heard of cakewalk.  Their shallow but understandable question is often "who uses that?"  I'm not saying  that Cakewalk should have went all out and signed big star of the moment into some kind of endorsement deal.  Even if they wanted to take a less mainstream route, they could have went all in on composers.  No secret that the staff view users have been annoyed for well over a decade. I get it that they wanted to create a great all around DAW, but that resulted in the jack of all trades, master of none dynamic that holds up well in a formal debate but terribly in market.

I think the Mac thing is overblown.  I know plenty of Mac users and Mac based studios that run a modest PC just to use FL, since they are going to end up mixing in Pro Tools or Logic anyway.

It is all your fault.
If you and everyone who ever used Sonar had bought a new Gibson Les Paul last Christmas then none of us would be in this mess.
That's what Gibson was counting on and YOU let them down and in doing so let us down.
 

 
.
 
There's your point.