The writing has been on the wall for Cakewalk for a long time.  Nobody should really be surprised.  And it sounds as if Gibson at large is not in much better shape.
 
A bigger issue (for me) is that the field is still extremely crowded, so I bet most of the DAWs are unprofitable or break-even at best.  That is discouraging because none of the others have really been making much of an effort to advance the state of the art.  It we had to rank them on the basis of the recent rate of progress, I'd say the big gorillas (ProTools and Cubase) would be near the bottom. 
 
StudioOne is attractive because they seem to be making more investment than some others, but is this sustainable? Presonus seems to be spreading themselves a bit thin, but it is hard to say because they are privately held.
 
Looking ahead, any guesses about what will be seen as the most active, vibrant DAW product in 2022?  Maybe it won't even be one of the products we see today.

Gibson bought Cakewalk, it seems, mainly for the intellectual assets and the talent. From what I've read Gibson didn't seem hugely interested in the Cakewalk brand or any of the cache associated with it, beyond using the Cakewalk brand to develop and market family/home user oriented products. The plan was to merge Cakewalk's pro level stuff into Tascam, and let Tascam become the face of the company as Tascam Professional. That plan was dropped and never enacted, and I'm curious to know why.  

I agree with Mister Happy on two things. Cheapskates. Yep. I work with a rapper / beat maker who I did an extensive two album project with Sonar 8.5.3 (now upgraded to Sonar Platinum lifetime). He's worked with me remotely on a few things and I've reminded him constantly that having similar platforms will improve speed and quality with a very minimal investment. He could afford the lower priced offerings of Cakewalk fully compatible with my DAW, they are well below $100, still he sticks with some freeware garbage that requires him to struggle exporting stuff and costs quality in the end. There is a reason for this and it's how it is, and there is no going back from it.

There is a generation that at age 20 today never paid a penny for any music they've heard. They want to be rap or rock stars or whatever, a few of them. They know they won't get a "big record deal" to buy yachts with. That ship has sailed. They can't justify paying an outside engineer a fraction of what they'd once make to get production quality they can be proud of, and do awful sounding stuff at home for free, merely because it's free. That said, I understand, it's hard to justify putting even $100 into a project that will make you zero sales. Where all your best friends say "it sounds great!" and ask where they can listen to the stuff for free because they won't pay for ****. 

The other big deal is the free plugins and synths. There are enough of enough quality in there now that other than making sure effects and synths are compatible with future Windows revisions, there is no reason to add more or to develop new features, add new samples. Just stop that entire side of Cakewalk and it's 1/2 to 2/3 of the actual cost likely. Just keep the current version stable with future Windows changes, find small edit workflow improvements and audio engine improvements in the future. You're not really scaling the product down, a few outside software effects folks might now continue so we lose them, that's fine. Most will and are part of the Cakewalk family.

mister happy
Hello,
Disagreeing with my statements is easy.

If anyone really wants to take on the subject they may refer to actual data.

For example;
 
http:\\www.goo.gl/SqDznR
 
NAMM members may access more recent info but this 2014 data is available for anyone. to read through.

Fretted Products $ 1,323,190,000
Wind Instruments $ 521,800,000
Printed Music $ 518,330,000
Percusion $ 381.570,000
Acoustic pianos $ 292.810,000
Stringed Instruments $ 109,000,000
Institutional Organs $ 29,000,000
Home Organs $ 13,000,000
Total = $3,188,700,000
 
 
Computer Music Products $ 360,000,000
used by both traditional musicians and electronic musicians

What you will notice is that despite popular stories of the demise of the music industry, the numbers were stable year to year and most categories posted small gains. Upon inspection you may notice that the highest profile businesses seem to spend so much being high profile that they often times not on the winners podium, but there are winners and music is being made by musicians with instruments that they continue to buy.

As I sit and watch the Thanksgiving day parades I am struck by the fact that the numerous marching bands have yet to be replaced with a few DJs riding on floats.

If your anecdotal evidence leads you to believe that young people no longer play music on instruments you might ask yourself "why is it that I do not know any young people that play traditional music".

If you do not care about this idea, that is absolutely fine, but if you purport to seem concerned or informed that the practice of making traditional music has disappeared you may want to figure out what it is about you that makes this perspective a part of your personal reality.

In the meantime, succeeding generations of musicians are actively continuing to pass along the knowledge and skills related to making music, These ideas will continue to benefit practitioners of all forms of music making.

Are you just trying to be a jerk?

I just said everyone has to play an instrument, didn’t I? That orchestra, jazz and marching bands are still going strong has zero to do with the cultural upheaval that is roiling the musical instrument business.

There a very few kids with big dreams in their heads buying guitars and drums anymore. These sales figures probably have to do more with an aging wealthy boomer population indulging themselves then anything else. I’ve spent a lot of time in music stores...it’s all old guys with a smattering of kids here and there.

How many recording studios have shut down? How many music retailers have gone out of business? How many clubs targeted to people under 40 are around compared with thirty years ago? How many SoundCloud rappers are out there finding success vs bands?

Stop obfuscating the issue.

mister happy
Witnessing Cakewalk's downward spiral caused by its insistence on catering to, and cultivating the patronage of, a community of cheapskates has been disappointing. I am not surprised by the vile backlash targeted at Gibson which is being voiced by this community. It was focused on getting something for next to nothing and now it has panicked at the realization that there is nothing more to get.
 

I really wonder who the ^$%& do you think you are speaking to here? Unless someone is here with a cracked copy, we all paid for our membership and the insinuation that we are a bunch of "cheapskates" is highly insulting. I never went into this to make money and I never expected to do so. However, between pro, platinum, synths, libraries and plugs, I have paid for 10 separate items through the CW store - most at LIST prices. Yes, I have gotten freebies but it is not like anyone here demanded them, I would never demand anything for free. But you are better than the rest of us because of what exactly?
 
And, if your diatribe is correct, it just goes to prove even more shenanigans by Gibson. They likely knew CW was not going to last much longer but yet they trotted out lifetime updates to boost sales. Talk about a pyramid scheme!
 
I can appreciate Gibson trying to make a go of CW. That does not mean I commend them when they make a conscious attempt to screw me over. With that, you can take your sanctimonious lips and kiss my ...
 

All of this is more complicated than it appears on the surface. For example, I don't think digital performer is keeping Motu alive. I think it's the interfaces. Pro Tools, Cubase, Studio One, Ableton, Logic all have hardware components. You can't download hardware from a torrent! Software theft is still a huge problem, and a software-only company like Cakewalk has a really tough climb ahead of it. If everyone who used Sonar had paid for it, the situation could be very different. Also bear in mind that it has to compete with Logic, backed by a company with 88 billion dollars in the bank or more, Audacity which is free, and Reaper, which was bankrolled by someone who made half a billion dollars selling a program to AOL.

Consider Studio One. It's worth it for PreSonus to have developed it if for no other reason so that it didn't have to pay license fees to another company to include software in their interfaces. The fact that it has taken off on its own is welcome for them, of course, but that's in addition to other valid reasons why it should exist.

I truly believe Gibson wanted to make Cakewalk succeed where others had failed. Unfortunately despite years of trying, it just didn't happen. I think there was some hope that something would pull it out at the last minute, like momentum. The person behind momentum was convinced it would be a huge success, but when it was introduced, it did not garner much interest and certainly did not garner much income...certainly not enough to justify keeping the company going. It's definitely a sad turn of events, but I can tell you that Gibson did want Cakewalk to be successful, it just couldn't make it happen any more then Roland could.

I do think that the announcement from Gibson should have been more specific about what will happen with the community, and the current owners. However the transition team at Cakewalk is going to be tying up loose ends, and don't forget that Cakewalk has always been a very customer-centric company. I think they're going to do everything they can to make sure existing customers can use the software for as long as possible so that people have time to transition to something else if that's the path that they need to take, or to see if by some chance something does happen with Cakewalk.

We will see what the future brings. Remember that the music industry is a fashion industry and everything can change in a matter of moments. Sometimes that works against you, as it has in this case. But, sometimes that works in your favor. If I could see the future, I would be buying and selling stocks, not writing books, doing seminars, and consulting.

In retrospect, there were probably things that could have been done to save Cakewalk. But while Sonar had an undo function, life does not, and that's why we are where we are...

Or those figures could have been repayment to investor on purchase of a company? Business rarely publish real profit / loss figures in my experience!

I always thought the Roland/Cakewalk partnership was a good one as Yamaha had Steinberg, and you had the two biggest synth/workstation manufacturers with competitive DAW's.  It's unfortunate that Cake was that insolvent.
 
I've long thought there are way too many DAW's on the market, but I always thought being a Windows only platform would help Cake survive.  It was by far the best Windows only DAW, and I really thought it held it's own with the big ones.  But the fact is the market share pretty much dried up very quickly with Studio One coming on the market and other products like Reaper seemed to do better.
 
Cubase I believe is still has the no. 1 install base on Windows.  It's really sad because I still believe that Sonar is one of the best DAW's out there, and I was even saying on one of the other forums, having use Studio One, there are things that are just a real pain in the butt trying to do in Studio One what you could with Sonar.  Of course I was still using V-Vocal and not Melodyne.  I have had multiple issues with Melodyne not recognizing my software license.  I've done so much with V-Vocal I just got used to it.
 
I agree that the writing has been on the wall a long time.  I always held out hope because this is by far the best user community for home recording.  Also the bakers are way more repsonsive to the user base than PreSonus has been with S1.
 
I was always skeptical of the Gibson/Cake partnership because Gibson is a terrible company.  It just made no sense the pairing of those companies, unlike with Roland.  I do hope someone buys the source code and does something with it productive.

Anderton
I do think that the announcement from Gibson should have been more specific about what will happen with the community, and the current owners. However the transition team at Cakewalk is going to be tying up loose ends, and don't forget that Cakewalk has always been a very customer-centric company. I think they're going to do everything they can to make sure existing customers can use the software for as long as possible so that people have time to transition to something else if that's the path that they need to take, or to see if by some chance something does happen with Cakewalk.

That would have helped Craig
 
It would also have been good if they had committed to a 3 or 4 month period of bug fix only maintenance although I guess that may me what 2017.10 is meant to be. Thinking back to when there used to be an annual release there was always an update a few months later that stabilised the product and when we skipped versions it was the stabilised one that we relied on and it was good for a number of years, Well at least that was my experience.
 
I'm sure that this has been a hard time for you and many others who were potentially aware of the reality of the situation but were unable to say anything. From what I have seen of you and others, like Noel, deception is not part of your make up so it must have been stressful.
 
As I have said elsewhere I stuck with Sonar 2 for a long time so I'm planning to do the same with SPLAT 2017.11 or a final stable release if one becomes available. I have a feeling that a lot of us will be using SPLAT a lot longer that we are expecting right now.
 
The other item that needs communicating is the expected life of the server(s) for Command Centre. I'm guessing that the cost of keeping them is not that significant and that they will be there for a few years but details like this will increase confidence.
 
The bigger concern in all of this has to be the viability of other companies trying to survive in a reducing market. I hope I'm wrong but it feels like Cakewalk won't be the only company that we lose.

denverdrummer
I always thought the Roland/Cakewalk partnership was a good one as Yamaha had Steinberg, and you had the two biggest synth/workstation manufacturers with competitive DAW's.  

The company that Roland should have bought was Datasonics the Australian Developer of VS Studio. Their integration with the VS range is really good and this would have enabled Roland to have a truly integrated PC/VS Midi Audio solution.
 
If VS Studio had a better UI I would have considered upgrading to it from the VS Controller only version.