NI and Izotope unify leadership teams

[flori89]

I just recently talked to someone who worked at NI on another topic. He said the NI management was such utter shite, any change to that can only be good since it’s hard to imagine to get any worse.

He was pretty bitter though and didn’t leave in good terms, so take it with a grain of salt.

He also said that NI used to be all about the product and how to perfect it, but now they are all about squeezing the last bit of money out of everything.

Personally I think the NI firings some years ago were actually planned and demanded by the equity funds (not the old owners) as a precondition to complete the "investment" deal, one of the objectives of the timing being exactly to try to shift any responsibility away from the new owners to the old ones.

I mean, deals like this don't happen that fast, equity funds don't put money before doing a lot of research and negotiation, and seems ridiculous to me that a CEO (and owner) would do huge cost cutting of like 1/3 of workforce then AFTER making such sacrifices to make the company profitable then suddenly sell it to a fund (arguably a 50% bigger company without such bad news attached about a VERY recent 1/3 workforce cut would sell for more right?) and leave...

(The first public news of NI "receiving investment" from equity funds is from 2017).

Not excusing the old CEO/owners, I mean in that scenario they would have agreed with it and implemented it.

But "the new owners can't be worse" sounds naive to me.

Yea I feel that he has give up on NI anyway, in his opinion they haven't released anything worthwile for years and are completly behind now technology wise.

I can't comment on that though, the few things that I own from NI are absolutely stellar, but I also don't have any of their hardware and I'm not invested in their ecosystem.

[kvmorgan]

Roland started 100% subscription and has gone the other way selling perpetual licences as well, people will have seen that....music stuff is just too niche for subscription only.

Good point. I am in favor of freedom of consumer choice. For some, subscriptions work. For others, they don’t. It is the arm twisting lack of choice that galls me about lock-in, pay-or-go-away style subscriptions. Such subscriptions demonstrate a self-interested willingness to take advantage of customers.

[pdxindy]

Sample/Patch browsing/tagging can get a HUGE assist for finding needles in an overwhelming haystack.

My solution is to get rid of the haystack.

Okay, but the haystack is their actual product for now You know, it's big and ever growing.

Like I said... hehehe

[erikgyle]

The subscription model is attractive for businesses because they never have to invest money upfront and hope to recoup it later. There's also a tax advantage: operational expenses (e.g. subscription fees) can be deducted from taxable income whereas capital expenditures (such as buying software packages) cannot.

It does not make sense for any company that wishes to target a consumer market to offer only subscriptions and miss out on consumer spending. I suspect they'll just offer both.

If you look at Mark Cattini's resume, his greatest success as CEO has been to sell off companies. Izotope and NI are both startups haven't "made it". The majority stake in NI had been sold off to a private equity firm while Izotope is debt-financed. This is not the IPO or the big sale that founders hope for. My guess is Cattini's been brought in to clean up the company and sell it off at a profit.

Meanwhile, Apple has been quietly buying music software companies and using its influence over the production ecosystem to embrace and extend the consumer experience ("spatial audio", anyone?). It likely would pay a few pretty pennies to control the world's leading mastering software to further streamline production geared toward its proprietary consumer features. And having the world's leading sampler ecosystem would likely accelerate the migration of any remaining Windows-based producers to Mac.

Hence, I think selling the company to Apple is their main goal and the most lucrative exit for their current investors.

If that fails, they could try to sell to someone else, though I can't think of another company as well capitalized and with as much to gain. Maybe Yamaha, but there would be antitrust issues where NI assets are concerned. What do y'all think?

[SLiC]

Roland started 100% subscription and has gone the other way selling perpetual licences as well, people will have seen that....music stuff is just too niche for subscription only.

Good point. I am in favor of freedom of consumer choice. For some, subscriptions work. For others, they don’t. It is the arm twisting lack of choice that galls me about lock-in, pay-or-go-away style subscriptions. Such subscriptions demonstrate a self-interested willingness to take advantage of customers.

I agree, ad the subscription market generally will eat itself and something new will have to come along, for example pay as you use.

An example of this is Netflix, once upon a time it was good value and a no brainer for many people, now there are 100 different subscription channels and the chances are the thing you want to watch wont be in that particular subscription...case in point, the new Star Trek Discovery has just been pulled from Netflix and will only be on Paramount+ which isn't even available in the UK!