Native Instruments and EMH Partners selling majority ownership to Francisco Partners
traktor's future continued
Quote:
Originally Posted by
xtianw
And this illustrates why without Amazon levels of investment. NI is dead.
...
Nobody officially gives a shit if they live or die at this point
Um... it's all in the article. They've doubled their user base in four years. NI is doing well in many respects, but they need a lot more investment to be able to handle all the different kinds of business they've gotten into.
So NI is not dead. A tech investment firm would not buy a huge chunk of a dead company.
Quote:
.I just wonder at exactly which point did they go wrong?
S2 and S4 were gamechangers. They perfected the layout of DJ equipment, unrivaled since. And the build, although not great, still had a certain parity with pioneer. Pioneer's tech was sturdier, NI sounded better and was way more portable. And was incredibly reliable.
S2/4 mk1 was the first fully reliable plug n play computer DJ tech.
So that was the position they had to defend. The market leader in controllers, for a hot minute at least.
But they went on the aggressive. Instead of leading the market in standard controllers, evolving the platter based paradigm, they tried to push the envelope. They bet the farm on stems, but got into this "betamax" type of jam. Cool tech but you could never really buy music for the format.
The Betamax video format died because it was propriatary tech, you could only buy Betamax video cassette recorders from Sony, while VHS was licensable tech, so there was much more competition, more selection.
The only company that has survived something like this is Apple. Everyone else needs competitors to adopt their tech.
So the mistake they made, if any, was a mixture of too much ambition, a bit of hubris, and distraction from other successes.
But you have to keep in mind that Pioneer DJ is a juggernaut. They are absolutely unique in scale and success, and their strategy made sure that there was very little space for competition. The only way I can imagine someone securely "taking out" a company like that is simply by losing a lot of money for a very long time, undercutting them on price until they go out of business.
Pioneer is a business, first and foremost. They sell things and grow market share. They make sure that they never upgrade their gear fully, leaving space in their current lineup for their next lineup. Compare that to Denon, that compete on features, making gear that runs circles around the features of any Pioneer Gear. NI is a creative company, or a technology company, they run on passion, making things they believe in.
Anyway.
The question now is: is DJ software, and laptops in clubs, getting outdated?
That would be the end of Traktor.
Obviously, if you don't have a rekordbox USB stick these days you're just torturing yourself. But personally, I prefer traktor and S4 mk3. Ideally, they would take Traktor to where they have taken Maschine with the new Maschine+, that works without a computer. An all-in-one box from NI is the only all-in-one I'd consider.
And there we come to Maschine. It's one of a pretty big lineup of NI hardware. The Maschines are very similar products to the Traktor controllers - as far as manufacturing goes. So investing in hardware capability was by no means a dumb step for NI.
I think the Maschine came before S4, and the audio interface for Traktor vinyl control as well. So the S4 wasn't a big step.
I think maybe that's the problem. Traktor wasn't NI's focus, and the all-or-nothing approach with S5/8 was an attempt to outrace Pioneer, instead of keeping a parity with them.
NI has well over a hundred software products, so maintaining that size of codebase is obviously a challenge.
I heard that the ipad version of Traktor was supposed to be a new codebase, programmed from the ground up, slated to replace the old Traktor. But I just checked and the ipad traktor was last updated 7 months ago, with bugfixes, but Traktor Pro dropped an upgrade with new features and the long awaited retina interface, so no more big pixels.
It doesn't feel like they've given up on Traktor, is what I am saying. I do think they respect that there is still a lot of us. Throwing us under the bus as Traktor users would also affect the relationship for those of us that buy their other products, like Komplete and Maschine.
That's why the rumors of them trying to sell it off make sense. A&H is a pretty great company, everything they do they do exceedingly well. And the strengths of NI, both in software tech and hardware, are at least matched by A&H. A&H makes huge digital mixers that need to work 100%, driving stadium concerts and the like.
If the rumored buyer would have been someone in a more budget category like InMusic or Behringer's Music Tribe, I'd be worried.
But even a Traktor + Denon combo would not be the worst thing, at this point.
The only think I can declare with conviction about Traktor is that it's too soon to tell. There's too much value in the brand to discard it, but things need to move along, that's for sure.
But I'm not going anywhere. nobody does DJ interface like Traktor.