On the demise of Emagic

[Markleford]

I'm pretty sure that some of the Steinberg people are in it for the money, and I would wager that the bigger companies "sold out" their passion a long time ago.

Well you do have a point there. Perhaps this should be amended...

Developers (yeah, the guys with their hands in the code) have passion... or at least start with it. The one-guy operations. Then if they get successful, they have to bring in more people to help handle the work. The more people they bring in, the less those people have to do with the software and more they have to do with counting the money!

Indeed: such people could give two shits about music software. But then those people start pulling the company down with bad decisions and greed, until the actual coders become distraught by what their company has turned into!

But I'd blame that on hiring policies: if I were a Cakewalk exec, for example, I wouldn't even think about hiring someone who didn't use a Cakewalk product daily. Then again, it might be hard to find a bean-counter to fit that description, but anyone in a strategic decision capacity should care about what happens to the product line.

Oh, and Charlie Steinberg *is* a whore.

- m

[Amberience]

Totally agreed on the refinement

[VitaminD]

righty-o

Microsoft is well versed in the hostile takeover.. basically they are a school-yard bully.. if they see something they like, you either hand it over or get trashed then hand it over.. either way you hand it over.

http://www.vcnet.com/bms/departments/ca ... alog.shtml

theres a happy little list.. albeit an outdated one.. but even so its still pretty long..

[kritikon]

Maybe a little OT, but I've read lots of comments about how the big boys buy out the little companies...as though the companies themselves have nothing to do with it.

Companies aren't bought...they are sold by someone. The very small ones would most likely, even if public, have the majority shares owned by the original company starter. Nobody can buy that company out unless the majority shareholder sells. And if the original company starter moans about having no control, because he floated his company on the market and let over 50% shares to be bought, then he deserves it for being so dumb, if he wanted to maintain control.

OK, there are well known pressures that the big companies can put on smaller ones, but within the small music s/w market, all of these companies were sold to realise money for whoever owned them...so why do we allocate integrity and honour on the small guys yet automatically allocate bullyboy mentality to the big ones? Whoever owned Steinberg, Emagic and anyone else you care to mention sold their companies to get rich. Period.

[simonkey]

I certainly wasn't patting Microsoft on the back in my earlier post - my opinion of that corporation is only marginally higher than my opinion of Simon Cowell - I was simply referring to their dealings with the music software business (so far...), nor am I knocking Logic as a program - I'd love it! - or version 7 as an update, it was just a pondering on the whole Apple future of it ... but it does seem to have got people talking, which is always good! Certainly didn't mean to upset anyone (if I have) with my (probably) ill informed opinions