The question we all seem to be asking is, "Why did SONAR fail?"  It is a great DAW, fairly easy to navigate and has a beautiful GUI.  It does anything I could ever want in a DAW.  So why is it now defunct?  I certainly don't know, but I'm wondering if CW overreached with SONAR.  Were they trying to compete with PT when PT already had it's market locked up?  Did CW not see Gen-X'ers wanting a DAW like Studio One that is uber-intuitive, doesn't require a manual and let's you crank out EDM at the speed of light?  Was SONAR just too expensive for the Reaper crowd?  I don't know.  Maybe it's all of these reasons, none of these reasons, or a dozen others I haven't even thought of.  I guess at this point it doesn't really matter, but I'd sort of like an idea as to why SONAR failed.  Any thoughts?

The only reason I stayed with SONAR over the years was brand loyalty and the fact that it worked for me through pretty much all versions.

Your penultimate sentence says it all, methinks, it doesn't really matter...

To be honest I don't think we'll ever know, there seem to be lots of factors involved.
 
Ultimately though Cakewalk's costs consistently seem to have exceeded revenue and no business can survive indefinitely when that is true.

For all we know it might be the thin end of the wedge, and more will follow. DAWs might just be an 'old geezer' thing, soon to be consigned to 'back in the day'.

I believe you get a pretty good idea of the cross section of Sonar's user base from the forum and other online user groups. Sonar's user base is decidedly mature (seems to be mostly 40+ with heavy representation of the 50's and 60s' age groups). You can tell just by hanging out here on a regular basis, or noting how many comments start with "let me just say I have used Sonar for almost 30 years now..." You go in the Facebook user groups and there are virtually no young people in there at all. It's all older guys. 
 
Now while this certainly has its positives - a loyal, unshifting user base is always going to be a solid foundation, and a mature demographic has certainly made for a (mostly) civil and well informed forum community - it was never going to be enough to save Cakewalk. You need to continually attract a fresh new user base and it's clear that Cakewalk didn't succeed at that. These fresh young users want tools that are less like a traditional studio and more like something that's been designed with modern software in mind. The older users want something that to a large extent mirrors their studio experience of yore. Some parts of Sonar are decidedly long in the tooth and the program has a lot of serious problems which make it troublesome for modern production techniques. It had a reputation for being unstable and buggy. Add to this the fact that no well known producers or artists are open about using it, and the fact that a negligible fraction of a percentage of the production videos you see online feature Sonar, and it's not hard to see why it was having so much trouble attracting new users. 
 
It doesn't matter how good Sonar was on paper - and you can talk forever about its feature set and its workflow - none of that matters if the program doesn't perform well. 
 
I believe that to save Sonar would have cost the kind of money Cakewalk didn't have. They really needed to spend a hell of a lot more on fixing existing bugs and quirks, many of which have plagued the program across multiple versions and given it a bad reputation. Its development team was no doubt stretched too far and things just weren't adding up. 

i think gibson overreached.

I think that once the cool kids on KVR and Gearslutz started slandering Sonar, younger people stayed away. Things like feature set, ease of use, and overall quality fade into the background in such a situation.
 
As far as Cakewalk management's strategy, it seems now that it was based on optimism. I spent a couple decades working for declining software organizations, and I saw the role of foolish hope. But then, what did you want them to do? Give up and go home? Cakewalk management always seemed like more of a class act than any company I've worked for.

sharke
I believe you get a pretty good idea of the cross section of Sonar's user base from the forum and other online user groups. Sonar's user base is decidedly mature (seems to be mostly 40+ with heavy representation of the 50's and 60s' age groups). You can tell just by hanging out here on a regular basis, or noting how many comments start with "let me just say I have used Sonar for almost 30 years now..." You go in the Facebook user groups and there are virtually no young people in there at all. It's all older guys. 

Something to consider...I never frequented these forums until I hit 45, last year.  I only popped in when I had a problem, then I was gone.  I have used Cakewalk since I was in my 20's - and spent my time using it, writing and recording about a hundred songs.  Busy busy busy - not interested in talking on the forum.  
 
Now I'm in my 40's, I've lost my youthful drive and I'm not working in the studio near like I was before - really not even close. I spend a lot more time scanning, reading and posting in the forum.  
 
I wonder if it's this forum that's more about old guys, because the young ones are working in their studio...?  Just a thought.  Since my wife isn't around, I thought maybe I could be right about something?  Maybe?

Voda La Void
 
 
I wonder if it's this forum that's more about old guys, because the young ones are working in their studio...?  Just a thought.  Since my wife isn't around, I thought maybe I could be right about something?  Maybe?

Voda La Void

sharke
I believe you get a pretty good idea of the cross section of Sonar's user base from the forum and other online user groups. Sonar's user base is decidedly mature (seems to be mostly 40+ with heavy representation of the 50's and 60s' age groups). You can tell just by hanging out here on a regular basis, or noting how many comments start with "let me just say I have used Sonar for almost 30 years now..." You go in the Facebook user groups and there are virtually no young people in there at all. It's all older guys. 

Something to consider...I never frequented these forums until I hit 45, last year.  I only popped in when I had a problem, then I was gone.  I have used Cakewalk since I was in my 20's - and spent my time using it, writing and recording about a hundred songs.  Busy busy busy - not interested in talking on the forum.  
 
Now I'm in my 40's, I've lost my youthful drive and I'm not working in the studio near like I was before - really not even close. I spend a lot more time scanning, reading and posting in the forum.  
 
I wonder if it's this forum that's more about old guys, because the young ones are working in their studio...?  Just a thought.  Since my wife isn't around, I thought maybe I could be right about something?  Maybe?

I don't think that's the case, because young people are in general far more prolific on forums and social media than older people. Plus if you go to the forums of DAW's that are popular with younger people (Ableton, Logic, FL etc) you'll find a much higher proportion of young people than you do in the Cakewalk forums. I think forum demographics do mirror user base demographics to a large degree. 
 
Two recent questions in one of the Sonar Facebook groups were quite enlightening. The first was "How long have you been using Sonar" and in virtually every case, the respondents had been using Sonar for a decade or more - sometimes multiple decades. I didn't read one person who said that they'd just started using it recently. That was worrying. The second was "how many tracks do your projects have on average," and people were giving ballpark figures along with the kind of music they produce. In almost every case, people were citing a relatively light track count, and almost nobody cited a modern genre - it was all things like folk, bluegrass, blues, jazz, rock etc. 
 
This suggests to me that to a large extent, Sonar has always been popular with older musicians who use the program as essentially a multitrack recorder, and less popular with younger musicians who are into modern production styles. I say there are more of the latter group buying new DAW's than the former group, and so any DAW wishing to reverse its dwindling fortunes could do a lot worse than to adjust its development priorities and do more to tap into this emerging market.