The times they are a changin' .....

 

You will own nothing and you will be happy eating bugs.

 

Buy from another brand:

Crucial X10 Portable 8TB - 829,99 €
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0F336NLC7...eb291888b02db585227d5412b&th=1&language=en_GB

 

Here is the trick: don't believe everything you're told—the tech-billionaire clique surrounding Mr. Schwab consists of only a handful of people. Simply stand your ground and say NO!!! And finally, stand up, fight back, and battle for your rights and freedom...!

 

It is not true. Magix owned Samplitude from 1998, Sequoia appeared in 2000, and both evolved enormously since then. Both were cutting-edge regarding their features (really were, it is not marketing at all). For many years Magix released software developed by their own. It wasn't until their final years that they let up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magix
https://web.archive.org/web/2010000...itude.com/us/presse/about_samplitude.520.html

 

can't wait the AI bubble pop, buying 4tb ssds for 200$ bucks again

 

Sadly, it will be at least 2-3 years before the prices go down...at least.

 

Holy fcking shit!! Is that serious??? I had to triple check the URL hahaha. God damn, I'm glad I decided to update my NAS at the beginning of the year. And to think, I was complaining I had to pay like $400 for a pair of 8TB WD RED spinners!!

 

It's far more pronounced in video editing circles - in my experience - for two reasons:

• 1) when you get hired straight out of school, you get hired based on your platform (Avid, DaVinci, or Adobe for the most part: due to Apple's stupidity, FCP is regrettably less and less part of the pro conversation) so you do "need to speak the same language as everyone else" indeed; and...

• 2) there are far fewer major players in professional video editing (Film, TV, Broadcast, Advertising) than there are in the Audio/DAW realm (there's so many now, I can't even list them all)

 

These are completely valid examples of products people install when collaborating, and even moreso if someone is mixing other peoples' projects. It is common for people to have multiple DAWs installed for exactly that reason. Sure, everything arriving in Protools would be ideal for some, but such customers are not who most people are getting work sent in from. Old versions will not open new versions' sessions, asking for stems is a dead giveaway, and it sucks to deal with all kinds of mistakes already baked in because some are not so easily fixed (overcompression, etc).

I'm not sure what this, or AI, have to do with NI. I do find it interesting that people who can write knowledgably will now need to dumb down what they write because when someone doesn't understand a topic they will claim something is "slop". Poor management and accounting driving a company into NI's situation are not comparing overlaps of TPS with Lean, JIT with Kanban, or Kaizen. vs CPI and 5S. Someone could have figured out the main problems at NI without ever leaving their desk.

 

Oh, I just brought that example up to show my point that we can't really stop using some software, not because we don't want to, but because of the culture around it, like Adobe for video editors or Waves plugins over producers.

About NI, well, the whole point I'm trying to make is that I see this happening with almost every company in the industry. It feels like they eventually can't keep growing without selling the very values that made them successful in the first place. And from what I saw, it's not like NI was giving everything away for cheap, yet things still ended up the way they did.

I'm not sure what caused the mass layoffs, so I can't say that was the reason. But I honestly wouldn't be surprised if AI-driven cost cutting was at least part of the conversation. We've seen so many companies saying things like "we can reduce costs by replacing people with AI" that it almost feels like an industry standard now. Especially after reading that "...the entire customer support team was terminated." Uber did something very similar by replacing a large part of its customer support with AI and automation.

 

funny seeing everyone on this thread try to figure out what it is or who to blame. When we all know what the sister site does. Takes a moment of self reflection to realize we have a pretty big part in this all going down. Even if you search Native Instruments on this forum most topics are about FREE ways of using their products.

 

You don't think the professional music industry is enough to keep them afloat?

 

Well, it keeps being framed as caused by capitalism, VC, and any other number of things. They can all be true, to some degree. But if a new owner of a company looks at the financials and sees the current roster of employees are still there after the company was driven into a half-billion dollar hole in the ground; it's a safe guess one of the first things they will do would be to stop the digging. Anyone hiding a shovel in their office closet are going to be the first ones gone, and most others would be trying to hide their own shovels under their desks.

Will AI replace some programmers, sure that is happening everywhere. Less expensive human ones will be brought in too. We're talking about programmers whose idea of scalable interfaces was to push LUA scripting onto 3rd party content developers, and whose idea of MacOS compatibility for their other flagship product, their keyboards line, could not load native Apple format plugins for multiple years and multiple versions. No matter what ecosystem they thought they had people locked into, it's pretty obvious that kind of thinking backfired. As has thinking "nobody can code this stuff but us".

 

what's next? you gonna say that we caused them a lost revenue of each pirated software we downloaded? lets be real, more than half of the people that go to piracy was not going to buy the product anyway

I've used cracked fl studio for 6 years, then when I finally had enough money to buy it I did, without thinking twice, but if wasn't for piracy, I would never had made the money to buy it...

What I'm tryin to show is that you're trying to blame something on the byproduct of its own failure.

 

About that, I still think capitalism is ultimately the reason behind layoffs like these. I see the economic system as the root of the criteria used to decide what's considered a good or a bad financial decision.

A state-owned company doesn't necessarily have to be profitable. Even if it's heavily in debt, if the service it provides is valuable enough to society, it can continue to exist, financed through other means. That's how it naturally should work...

A privately owned company doesn't really play by those rules. At the end of the day, it has to be profitable. Having valuable products is good, but optional. Having respectable policies is good, but optional. Treating employees well is good, but also optional. Profitability isn't.

You probably see where I'm going with this.

When a company acquires another company that was already in debt, whose main value comes from creative work done by people, and one of its first major decisions is to lay off a large part of that workforce while the industry is increasingly pushing AI and automation as cost-cutting tools, it tells me that preserving the company's creative role is no longer the priority. The focus shifts to improving the numbers on paper, even if it's clearly against the own company logic.

And it's not that I think companies shouldn't care about money. Of course they should. My issue is when financial performance stops being a priority and becomes *the priority*, to the point where they're willing to weaken the very creative process that gives the company its value in the first place.

And that's where I say the root of the problem is capitalism. This is only possible, and often even encouraged, because the economic system rewards exactly that kind of behavior. It can reward other behaviors too, and that's probably one of the reasons we know NI in the first place. But when those values come into conflict with maximizing financial returns, profitability always wins.

Money should matter, but not more than the value a company creates for people. To me, that's ultimately more valuable than money itself. But that's probably a much broader philosophical discussion. I think the difference between our opinions lies at that deeper level.


About the company behavior: yeah for sure, actually I don't think native instruments was really doing an amazing job even at the creative level at all, their layout is so old and the way kontakt work has been the same for like, ever? it's crazy that they didn't profitted doing so bad at that and charging the prices they did, wild.