Native Instruments 20% layoffs. they say whole industry is contracting
Well I dont believe it, but maybe others think this does not bode well for Cycling 74.
Personally, I used to love reaktor , there not being another alternative on the PC way back when, even though it was full of bugs, the ability to use a GUI for software at all was amazing. I posted a collection of >100 buga on Reaktor 4, which was nowhere near as complicated as the current versions, it din't have core. and nowhere near as sophisticated as Max. After being ignored for several months I reluctantly started getting rude. They hired a product manager who did fix the bugs, but his objective, he later confessed, was to make the synth I had been wanting. When he finished it, it took him a year, he quit.
Since then everyone has started being rude on the NI forums. After the last foray there I asked to have all my posts on the NI forums deleted. My request was ignored for at least a year, suddenly they did delete them all, and I only just found out, because they also banned me. I have no idea how many other people got on my case there, but I have since learned, it was started by one employee who was developing his own products on the side secretly. He had written me asking to buy EU rights to my software. When I refused, he stole my stuff, then started spreading nasty false rumors everywhere, even on Cakewalk forums, which I didnt find out until after I deleted my Web server and started a new one.
Other software folks have been very nice to me, including here. It seems tobe a particular problem with German audio software. But this is not really an emotional gripe, I just needed to lay down the history a little before saying, I am not surprised at all that Native Instruments is having financial problems, and I think it will probably go out of business, for purely practical current facts.
So I am going to remark on this, for what it's worth, I now have FOUR NI installers AND a DONGLE that don't work. NOT EVEN THE DONGLE WORKS. Installing their last 'platform' took six hours on a top-end machine when it first came out. It was not a platform either, but a rummage bag of half finished software for $1200. And it's not like it's getting any better. I bought a new machine in May, so I just wanted to update Reaktor. That's all. I couldnt install any of the FOUR previous versions, their installers no longer work, AND GET THIS, the CURRENT installer didn't work EITHER. I had to search on the forums for half an hour to find out the current installer update, which you have to install to use NI software AT ALL, is ALREADY known to hang indefinitely on new machines while it looks for yet more new updates, until you restart the computer and reopen in until it hangs THREE TIMES. This is 2019. Most people don't tolerate even one restart any more. And some people like me have paid well over a thousand dollars for prior platforms and updates. These days, people paying that much money just don't come back. Alot of people who are starting out and buying somethings for <$100 won't even bother getting the current installer working. They'd just throw it out, frankly, if I wasn't retired, I wouldn't have the time to go through all that all over again yet again either. I'm not surprised its not making money..
I think the real change in the industry is that people no longer have the patience for giant software products that take hours to install. Adobe already came to that conclusion years ago,. Of course others may agree that audio software is in general going through a large cvontraction,. and I do note there is far less activity on the Cycling74 forums than there used to be, but personlly, it seems to its because there's alot less bugs in Max. So maybe the reduction in posts is actually good ) - Not so for Native Instruments perhaps, but maybe true here.
Only thing I can remember is, years ago I pirated and installed the entire Komplete collection. Then some years after that when I wasn't a bum, I ended up actually purchasing Komplete from NI. As far as I remember, the process for installing cracked Komplete was far easier than whatever installer NI was using... that's all I really have to say on this lol
i see no problem in using dongles, and i see no problem in downloading 2 gigabytes of updates every three months, because both has been known to the customer before he bought.
what i really dislike is when companies sell products to their customers which dont work, with dongles which dont work either, and when you ask for support you dont get a reply at all or they lie to you.
"pay for the sofware you use but install the crack" has always been a working method - and nowadays you can sometimes avoid both by using all the great free sofware out there. (or by making your own)
that a software company which uses overcomplicated copy protection schemes and work with services to send dmca notices themselves is found stealing code of their own customers and/or smaller companies is not a surprise at all. remember, it is a company...
the average rating for their customer support is somewhere around "inadequate" everywhere:
https://de.trustpilot.com/review/www.native-instruments.com
sad but somehow entertaining also what staff members have to say.
https://www.glassdoor.de/Bewertungen/Native-Instruments-Bewertungen-E33496.htm
"Ständige Änderungen in der Unternehmensstruktur - Wenig strategischer Fokus - Unternehmensziele richten sich nach Managementempfinden statt nach sinnvollen Strategieentscheidungen - Keine Entwicklungspläne [...]
To rescue this company and save your lifetime achievement, pay out the investors and let people run the company who have the proven ability to actually do it. [...]
Many people are getting layed off without any kind of social responsability, all innovative projects got cancelled. The management is a complete mess. Raodmap and OKRs change on a weekly basis. [...]
No clear direction from upper management. Spontaneous decisions made with extreme effects on working conditions. [...]
The upper management is ABSOLUTELY disconnected from the teams and colleagues at all levels. Completely lack of transparency and honesty by them - their decisions are made by a roulette. Random decisions are being made without consulting the teams. [...]
Diabolical decision making and guidance from the c-level. Constant restructurings, poor salary, very little possibility for career advancement or skillset improvement. Illegal lay-offs, monumentally poor CEO who does not appear to have the skills to run a company which has grown so large [...]
Mannschaftsführer sind oft unprofessionell, jeder Prozess ist sehr langsam. [...]
Rat an das Management: Ein bisschen weniger Show und dafür mehr Resultate den Mitarbeitern präsentieren. [...]
Sadly I had too much experience in badly managed silicon valley companies going public to imagine it. All I can say is, the only thing I saw of their LA office was a photo of empty desks with no windows when they wanted someone for 'customer service' (I rarely call customer service at all, so I can't comment further). You'd have to pay a six-figure salary to get a decent experienced musician on full-time staff in LA, and the company obviously isn't doing it, or you'd see their movie and song credits on the products. They probably scrape the barrel out of community college and their LA staff are living on nothing, except for a few executives with MBAs and no music or engineering experience living on Malibu Beach, who don't go in the office much because they're too busy.
I'm still trying to imagine how they can even ship software installers which require three reboots and software restarts on new machines. For one thing, they must h rely entirely on free beta testers and have no QA staff at all. I'm an engineer, not a musician, really, so the last thing I can add to that is, it's difficult to hire good engineers if you don't have good QA staff. We're fussy that way. After developing some difficult code, we don't want to test it ourselves. It's like actors not wanting to see their own movies. We want to make it as good as we can and someone else test it while we rest and prepare for the next push. So saying, I'm back to finishing Husserl2. Wishing you guys all the best )
as of today, they are firing 200 of their 400 staff members.
to "change their strategy". (did they ever have one?)
p.s. and you guessed right; most berlin based devs get a salary of around 45,000 euro, which is a joke compared to what you would make when you´d stayed independent with your little product.
thats sounds grim, 20% to 50% layoff in a week. More on the way next week, out do you think?
based on how roadmaps where dealt with in the past i would say "everything can happen"
with an investment fonds as your most important stakeholder this is what happens.
You know, if they do shut down, it will be highly ironic that my website libraries are still online after all the nasty things they said about my site, lol. And when I was still actively selling Reaktor-based products, I had to put my site on a DOD military-grade server. I got nowhere near the amount of hostile cyberactivity in silicon valley. I had created Web servers for Intel and Apple in the past, and they were easier to keep online. The Reaktor community is really nasty.
did you see that desaster between audiofile engineering and their contractors last month?
products go boom, laywers get rich.