Hi Craig,
this might sound like a silly joke, but I think
you should write a novel/documentary
called 'The Rise And Fall Of The Cakewalk Empire'.
 

With all respect Craig,  but...
You was very close to that all. So:

Anderton
a) Software theft is still a huge problem...
b) Also bear in mind that it has to compete with...
c) I truly believe Gibson wanted to make Cakewalk succeed where others had failed...

a) The first was an argument when new copy protection was introduced. Had it any success? Was it worse the money invested? If no, why it is still there? If yes, why you again mention that?
 
b) competing with the concurrence without updating core engine capabilities, by adding plug-ins, interface buttons and completely unrelated staff like Momento? Seriously?
 
c) I was tracking almost all your posts, CW posts, outside info... What I have not seen is any spells HOW Gibson tried to make it success. By letting them shoot school like promo videos themselves? Buy letting them take rather questionable marketing decisions? By delivering Cubase with audio interfaces? By not associating still known labels, like "Gibson guitar" with Sonar? (the only videos on Youtube which comes are from your or about your.... no single pro made video when good players with Gibson guitars record something in Sonar...)
 
Sorry, all that does not make any sense for me. As I write in another thread, I was breaking my head in attempt to understand any single decision during Cakewalk movements under Gibson. But now I put the list together, and it make sense. Not that I like it, but at least something I can understand. I hope I am wrong:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3691528
 
I remember you was writing about betting single cents with people who claim that will happened, and that you could be rich. You should be happy you have not
 
PS. I want to repeat, no offense and no disrespect. Just ordered thoughts and a bit humor... 

Anderton
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.

 
With all due respect to Craig, I don't think any of his proposed explanations hold water.
 
As we found out from the OP's acquisition filings, Cakewalk was losing money while at Roland, where Sonar was also not keeping the larger company alive. Except unlike Cubase for Yamaha or StudioOne for Presonus (both also acquisitions), Sonar did not prevent Roland from needing to license other OEM DAWs due to lacking mac support. So the differentiating defect is thus with the product development strategy, not (only) circumstances.
 
The competition with Logic is also an insufficient explanation, as every DAW competes with Logic, and every DAW (aside from Cubase) has a full-featured product tier at the $200 level. Sonar did too, yet somehow it is the only one is being shuttered. 
 
I propose an alternative explanation: Cakewalk existed in a bubble. It had a tendency to promote from within. Product managers became executives, QA people became product managers - there seemed to be no product leaders coming from the outside who were not already deeply entrenched in the company or Sonar. This kind of insularity and groupthink can render a company unable to respond to changing markets and demands. Long-time users of the same product can fail to notice usability flaws and design defects that are glaring and, perhaps, prohibitive for a newcomer. This is why I switched - because Using Sonar became full of hassles that didn't exist with other products. I'm assuming this is why some big-name artists (Justin Lassen, Dot da Genius) had switched away too and why others didn't switch over.
 

Amicus717
Found this online while researching the Roland/Gibson sale from 2013: https://www.roland.com/RolandComSite/media/global/release/pdf/2013/20130924.pdf

I’m not sure that document tells us much worth knowing. When examining the financial situation of a subsidiary company the picture isn’t complete without seeing the full financial details of its parent as well. There are many accounting methods which allow a subsidiary with income that exceeds its costs look like it is a loss-maker. Which nominal losses might then be open to writing down against corporation or other taxes.

What I do know about Roland is that back when that document was drawn up it was itself in some financial difficulty. Which may have prompted the sale of Cakewalk to Gibson in the first place.

What I would be mildly interesting in seeing is a full financial breakdown of how a relatively small software company could make sales totalling $10,307,000 and end up with overall negative income for the year. What money came in and where it went. But that’s not likely to happen, would mostly be to satisfy my curiosity and is water under the bridge now anyway.

mister happy

 
SONAR X1 was repeatedly excused as the most successful version of SONAR ever. That year ended with a gain in losses of 220,000 dollars for a total year end loss of $426,000.
By the time X1E had furthered this great success the total loss for the year was $891,000 and the companies assets had been scuttled.
 
The fact is that Gibson, probably the infamous CEO himself, stepped in as an ANGEL INVESTOR and provided Cakewalk with several more years of opportunity to balance the situation.
 
Cakewalk then proceeded to execute a litany of transparently desperate attempts to secure revenue at minimal expense, but it seems to have cost too much to do so. 
 
Gibson is a privately held company so the facts about Cakewalk disappeared from public view. Meanwhile, the minister of propaganda lambasted anybody that commented about the business and the obvious situation with insulting rhetoric.
 
The perspective, as I see it, is that Gibson saved the day for Cakewalk, but that was several years ago, and Gibson can no longer afford to prop up a operation that will not support itself.
 
I still rely on SONAR 8.5.3 for my work, but paid my way through to Platinum Lifetime updates hoping that someday someone would emerge and lead the company with common sense. It always seemed to me that if Cakewalk merely focused on the DAW, and not a smorgasbord of free goodies that cost a lot of resources and money to serve up, the company could find efficiency and prosperity by serving the customers who realize how dependent they are on timely and effective service. Users such as myself, who want to continue to capitalize on the skills they have learned using SONAR and will gladly pay to support an operation focused on maintenance rather than bloating.
 
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 have also been and continue to be perplexed by the myopic focus on a popular myth that electronic music has replaced traditional forms of music. Guitar and acoustic piano sales remain strong and the sales numbers for those categories dwarf the sales activity of electronic music devices by twenty fold. Digital audio software companies that entertain the interests of musicians that use staff notation seem to be doing as well. Presonus is a good example. Electronic music may seem popular on the "charts", but It has seemed obvious that any business in the music instruments industry that chooses to ignore the opportunity to serve the millions and millions of people who already know, and continue to learn, how to play traditional forms of music is operating with an easy to identify opportunity cost.
 
In any event, Gibson was an angel investor that saved Cakewalk and gave it a chance to survive. It bought Cakewalk when no one else could afford to touch it. It must have been a great struggle to justify a sponsorship such as this. We will never know how much money Gibson wasted in an attempt to keep Cakewalk afloat while users continued to enjoy receiving product.
 
I appreciate Gibson for having tried. 
 
Thank you.

 
There is a lot of emotion being expressed on these forums the past few days. It's understandable, but I appreciate your data driven opinion, even if your data is well past its sell-by date.
 
However until quite recently Cakewalk customers, including me, were buying upgrades every year or so after having bought the original program. So when you refer to me and others as "a community of cheapskates," I guess you have decided you don't need any data to support that personal smear.
 
So f*ck you for that.

I think Anderton's explanations are exactly in line with what I would think. Cakewalk has been losing money with Sonar because the DAW business is a tough one. It's likely that Studio One, Logic, and Reaper all lose money too, either being loss leaders for another product or a labour of love by someone who has money to burn. With so many good competing products I wouldn't be at all surprised if only the top 2 or 3 make money consistently. How many word processors make a profit? How many commercial competitors does Photoshop have? How much did you pay for your web browser?
 
I used to be very angry at Cakewalk because there were so many Sonar bugs that affected my workflow. But I came to realise that they just did not have the resources to both fix those bugs and deliver the new features they required in order to compete. I never got the feeling that the Cakewalk people lacked ambition or vision, just that they couldn't possibly deliver everything we asked for in a reasonable timescale while continuing to build on the codebase they had with the income and team size available to them.

jamesyoyo

mister happy


 
Blah, blah, blah etc...... 

 

Are you just trying to be a jerk?

No, I don't I think he is - it just comes to him naturally.

About this SOFTWARE PIRACY thing.
 
Anderton said above "Software theft is still a huge problem, and a software-only company like Cakewalk has a really tough climb ahead of it."
 
However we live in a world and an online world now .. especially amongst millenials+ where EVERYTHING AS A RIGHT IS FREE inc Music and software via cracks and the like. These people do not want to pay for anything because why should they, its for free all around them.
 
A 17 year old acquaintance of mine. I said to him "Your earning a bit of cash now, like music, why not pay a tenner a month for Spotify and have every album ever made at any time". Answer I got back was, "why should I, I can just listen to what I want for free on YouTube" 
 
So software theft in my mind does not matter because these people are never going to be paying customers anyway. If they couldnt get cracked software for free they certainly are NOT going to pay for it. So count these people out of the figures for perspective buyers of likes of Sonar.
 
 

The title of this thread made me reflect back on Roland and that overall they have maintianed a pretty good reputation for making quality gear. Pricey, but scertainly a company I've learned to trust. All my Roland gear ( and Yamaha too) still works. My 505 is from 1984 and It has never been shelved. It s been abused and tossed around, put in road cases without protection. Anyhow, they are Japenese and the Japanese businesses seem to have pride of workmanship and quailty control. I own 2 Subaru's one was made in Japan, the other in the USA. The Japenese one is holding together better ans so far has had not one issue at 200,000 K.  I have a few Japenese instruments and I think they are more than equal to any made in USA. 
Anyhow being the good business people they were at Roland, I can see why they opted out of a shinking ship. 
I'm not sure where they make their money these days as their product line has certainly not changed in a decade. It would seem they know what they are doing and stopped wasting money on development a while back. 
 
A local boy Jeff Koftinoff who wrote software for Atari later worked for Roland and was the person that made the software to edit the MT 32 and a lot of Roland synths. He worked for them for a long time. Hey, he still has his web site- http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/
The Pro Midi player still to this day the best thing I ever used live. I asked him to add the joystick/ Footswitch option and paid him $100 to customize my version. He added it as a regular feature. I was even tempted to run STeam the Atari ST Emulator on a XP laptop and use his program again. It midi output driving Sonar or reason loaded with VST's. 
 
I was a Roland dealer when I had my music store and that was my first experiance with Cakewalk as I was given a bunch of Disks to hand out when I sold the Piano's and whatnot. It was in the late 90's and I think it was Guitar studio. I didn't have a PC yet but I still had a disk in 2000 when I got my first PC. I would say that that disk is 100% responsable for me being a Sonar die hard.
 
And die hard I will remain. I will continue to use Sonar, I will even go to any trouble it takes me to make it work for as long as possible. And I am optomistic that the Cakewalk code will re surface someday just in time to save my arse. 

There is a lot of interesting thoughts and opinions contained in this thread.
 
Firstly, lets think of the last 300 years of western art music like this - music composition, drives music innovation, which drives music technology...think Beethoven and the piano forte and Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody. Yes you can draw a metaphorical line between Beethoven and Queen. Now lets think about how artists have payed in the past to the present for their work. Beethoven freed us from the tyranny of the church, and gave composers some level of autonomy and freedom. This was the beginning of the capitalist system, because it was the aristocracy that stepped in and became the patron of the arts. Through modernism, and because of the copy problem...the veneration of art ceased and the cult of personality became the thing people brought...art was still amazing mind you because you know, even John Lennon still had to learn an instrument and sing. We're now at a point in the history of music, and indeed the history of humankind where change - the digital disruption is forcing us to reevaluate everything. The guitar, like the violin is fading...Gibson is proving this. It is sad, but what the composer has at his or her fingertips makes the guitar look very limiting. As is the notion of the band. Furthermore, there is nowhere for bands to perform anymore, and in reality only spotty faced teens and people in their early 20s ever really supported this model
 
There is no money in recorded music anymore...so software only companies will suffer and like the violin and the guitar go the way of the dodo. It should never have happened to Cakewalk...I'm still struggling to find another DAW that records at 64bitfp and indeed has upsampling. These two things are the software solution to the hardware problem. This is what Cakewalk should have been trumpeting. Of course, the hype of Crapple - It Works - also created a false myth that it was a Crapple computer or nothing for creatives. It was a clever lie, which has now caused larger problems across music technology creators. The Crapple app money myth too has created a problem, I've said this...but I've investigated mobile music making technology, and for the most part the software was a gimmick and a toy. No serious composer or indeed musician could make great anything off this junk. Now we're back to my opening gambit, because if I'm right...we're now in a bottleneck situation...because there is no one pushing music composition, which is needed to drive music innovation, which is needed to drive music technology. The proof is not just in the failing of once behemoth companies like Gibson, and boutique brands like Cakewalk...it is also in the sickness of our music schools and conservatoriums. The next big push in music technology will probably come in the form of augmented reality controllers, and virtual reality performance...or this seems to be the logical next step, but we will still need composers to push in this direction...but because of an earlier bottleneck, which popular music has propagated or the lack of music literacy is going to hamper this. 
 
We're now in a situation, which history suggests is a fait accompli - where we're at the beginning again. Before Mozart, before Beethoven and indeed before The Beatles, there was no money in music and people mostly played for themselves simple folk tunes...there of course was religious music too. This is where contemporary music and sound culture is at now. 
 
We're going to have to hold on, and I hope the lack of input from Cakewalk on this forum means something is happening in the background with Microsoft...because Sonar is still ahead of the curve ball in regards to their mix engine. And if we're going to start a new A.V or audio-visual music revolution...Sonar will be the program needed the most to lead this charge. And I use the term audio-visual music because sound or music cannot be divorced from one another in The Internet age! 
 
Peace and Love Neb