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You need the advanced features you are talking about stripping out if you are doing any serious work. And... there are plenty of greatly simplified DAWs for the home users already, such as Sonar Home Studio etc.

I never said otherwise.  Please read my post again before jumping to such conclusions.  I said that most of what is done with DAWs has nothing to do with commercial sales of albums.  and that for Microsoft to be interested they need to see a market with millions of customers.  There aren't millions of people producing commercially successful albums.  If Microsoft does something, it will be biased toward the lightweight user.
 
I do agree there are plenty of lightweight products already, so it isn't likely that Microsoft will replicate that.  They are more likely to do something more analogous to what the Surface Studio does for graphic art.  But even so, I doubt many professional illustrators have switched to the Microsoft software.  Microsoft's market is for the layer under the top professional where millions of people might have some interest.

Well yes, like I said their commercial product would be competing with Logic Pro and probably a freebie bundled with windows to compete with Garage Band.

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Yes, a lot of people have been suggesting MS buy it and how great that would be. I'm not sure it would be so great. Sonar had personality and character. I wonder if they may have also bought the name 'Microsoft Cakewalk'.

 
Just so you know: I migrated to Cakewalk when Microsoft bought out  The Blue Ribbon Bakery, developers of Bars n Pipes Pro, which at the time was head and shoulders above every other sequencer out there, apart from it being Amiga only. 
MS then closed the doors on BPP and set the BRB devs to working on Direct X software for windows instead. 
After some considerable time (year or so) MS did agree to let the BRB developers set the program AND THE CODE free, but by that time musicians had moved on to stuff that was still in existence and development.
Don't hold your breath waiting for MS to actually rescue Sonar. 

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Audioicon
We want to sell the source code, why? So lets get rid of all the users and potential customers and increase sales of our competitors. 

All the sonar and many other DAW users are already Microsoft/Windows users. It would take MS quite a while to develop their DAW even using the code from Sonar - may a year or 2. They wouldn't care less about Sonar customers transferring over to other DAW in the meantime. They know that plenty of their existing customers will buy into it when it arrives and most of all, they know it will impact on Mac and stick another nail in Apple's coffin. It may not be what is happening - I said it's just a theory. But it would make perfect sense for MS to pick something up that is already mature, fully developed and proven as a base for their own DAW. Plus put Cakewalk out of business and take it in-house. Why would MS buy Cakewalk when they just want the code and patents associated with the products?

Well, with that explanation, you could be right. :)

ivanSC

35mm
Yes, a lot of people have been suggesting MS buy it and how great that would be. I'm not sure it would be so great. Sonar had personality and character. I wonder if they may have also bought the name 'Microsoft Cakewalk'.

 
Just so you know: I migrated to Cakewalk when Microsoft bought out  The Blue Ribbon Bakery, developers of Bars n Pipes Pro, which at the time was head and shoulders above every other sequencer out there, apart from it being Amiga only. 
MS then closed the doors on BPP and set the BRB devs to working on Direct X software for windows instead. 
After some considerable time (year or so) MS did agree to let the BRB developers set the program AND THE CODE free, but by that time musicians had moved on to stuff that was still in existence and development.
Don't hold your breath waiting for MS to actually rescue Sonar. 

This is a very different thing and in a modern market. MS wouldn't have bought a company, they would have bought the code and with a clear aim in mind. They wouldn't be rescuing Sonar or Cakewalk. They are developing their own DAW.

Microsoft did it before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Dynamics_NAV
It worked and the programmers and the customers lived long and prosper ;-)
Everybody, please sign the petition!

I wonder will we ever hear what happened to Cakewalk, Sonar etc and/or why?
 
I suspect we will not.
 
At some point next few weeks or next week once this black friday / thanksgiving thing is over Cake customers might get an email which wont say much that has not been said already, then a farewell with unlock codes for when server dies.
 
I have a gut feeling all this will get wrapped up very soon inc these forums. Seems to be the way this whole thing has been rolling.