Eww!  Try again Beep!!!

Beepster

With great weight comes great heart attacks?

I look at that and think "If that was swinging into a building, I bet the building would take the damage!"

Beepster

Bapu & Beepster gettin' jiggy.
 
(I'll not say which is which. Juan must leave sum ting to the imaginarium blob on yer shoulders).

So they would own the software they include with their TASCAM audio interfaces.

Roland bought Cakewalk because they thought it would help them sell hardware. They sold Cakewalk because it didn't. Why Gibson bought them remains a mystery.
 
Roland had had a long history with Cakewalk, especially in Japan, e.g. translating CW documentation into Japanese for them. Roland had also provided CW with V-Vocal, but it was purely an as-is sale and Roland never followed up to keep it competitive with similar products that kept getting better.
 
Roland's history with acquisitions shows a pattern of buying companies but doing little to help them. Ikutaro Kakehashi's autobiography offers insight in that regard, and is a recommended read. He's an inspirational figure, a real self-starter who expected every company he bought to fly on its own. 

Arguably the Gibson philosophy has been to pessimistically/realistically recognize that guitar sales were going to be on a downward trend as new music styles and production techniques made the guitar hero an endangered species no longer to be emulated by every fourteen year old with a rich grandmother, then to optimistically believe that they could predict or shape the future by buying up technology that they believed would catch the next updraft.
 
Attempts to computerize the electric guitar and automate tuning were somewhat less than wildly successful. Investment in high end audio listening seem to have missed the point that most people are happy with the quality of their cell phone music, to the point that consumer audio without a way to connect an iPhone today look quaint if not a bit daffy to the masses. A foray into music production equipment probably made them realize that they did not have a foot in the already fraying and rapidly overdeveloping market in DAW software, which they correctly assumed would be the new instrument to replace the guitar (sequencer hero?), but without the realization that the mass market demand was closer to GarageBand than to ProTools.
 
Baldwin Pianos and Organs must have looked like a bargain when it went bankrupt in 2001, but pianos like guitars have been taking a hit as MIDI enabled electric keyboards have advanced to the good enough level at a price well below that of a sculpture of wood and wire, even one made in China. 
 
So overall, a justified fear of becoming irrelevant as a guitar maker, and a series of acquisitions that look like too short leaps after the departure of the music business into a future they foresaw a decade too late, into water that may well be too deep. The CEO apparently sees himself as an empire builder capable of magical manipulation of synergy to bring forth a massive new music themed conglomerate. Let us all hope he can convince more investors to trust his judgement before the bill for the buying spree comes due.