Then I guess you shouldn’t have started talking about morals and ethics then, right? 
It’s good to be the mod.
you’re tilting at windmills here, the whole capitalist world is based on incentives and without them there would be no nuendo in the 1st place. i understand and support principles of solidarity in certain areas and am glad they are in place here in europe (health & education), but the DAW market is a different playground.
I don’t see anything unethical about Steinberg offering incentives. It is still the customer’s choice.
I think it is only unethical when the customer has no choice as Avid has done time and time again. Avid has successfully leveraged its market share to force many to stay with them. An example: OMF used to be over a $1000 option, with the “lite” versions, if you wanted to commit the heresy of porting to a different system. They set it up so that it wasn’t “may the best DAW win”. They are the 800 pound gorilla. I own Pro Tools now simply because I had no choice.
That being said, Pro Tools is not a bad system. Though I much prefer Nuendo.
Dean
It makes me laugh when people are trying to put business decisions into ethics etc. This is business and Avid brought this on themselves if anything. If Avid owners don’t want to use the Crossgrade offer, they are not forced to are they? There are no ethics in business anymore (if ever) and to me this whole discussion is a bit pointless. Fredo is playing a devil’s advocate here whilst (O bet) using his lovely Apple products - company who’s well known for exploiting both competition and their manufacturing sites employees…
To me it’s very simple… If someone does want to opt out of Avid’s new terms - they have a solid option to consider. There is no gun put to their heads or anything so get over it mister Fredo…
I’m just a fly on the wall here.
Un-fortunately, commenting seems to be the only to follow this conversation.
Pro Tools Expert has done a vote to find out what users are planning to do with their PT licenses.
At least form the result of this unofficial web poll it looks like quite a few users are planning to abandon their platform.
I have kept and upgraded my PT license, despite the fact that I do 99.5% of my jobs in Nuendo.
For a forced $600 dollars / year they are going to lose me for sure.
Ollie
I don’t know, if we nuendo users are in any way responsible for the ethics of Avid customers.
I rather think the collective companies under avid’s roof don’t give a bag of beans about us…and would like to chew SB up, anytime, if it wasn’t a part of Yamaha.
But, … I know quite a few PT-guys who had gladly changed over to Nuendo if there had been anything like a crossgrade offer. Never underestimate the power of a little incentive gift.
It is done anytime and everywhere on this dreaded planet and called business and competition.
Hey, we are not talking about a frail half-dead kitten, laying in the middle of the mainroad…
There is no ethical conflict there if SB introduces a crossgrade offer now.
PT used heavy boots many times before and didn’t look left nor right and thus became much too powerful and popular for its performance. Not nice, but veeery efficient.
And a laughing face can have such positive effects on people…. Lol…
Cheers, Big K
Economist
Fredo, your attitude is foolish in the extreme.
It’s like this: If Avid screws its customers, and Steinberg offers a special crossgrade to Avid’s disaffected users, what is really happening is that Avid is being made to suffer financially for its poor treatment of its customers. And this is, after all, about Avid’s poor treatment of their customers.
And let me tell you this: that companies take advantage of their customers is a huge problem and it’s a huge problem every day, and that huge problem exists because there are too many companies that know that there are no consequences for their sleazy behavior. If they thought that there would be negative consequences, there would be much less of such behavior. Possibly if Avid knew that not only would their users be unhappy with Avid’s latest policies but that other companies would attempt to capitalize on PT users’ disaffection, then maybe Avid wouldn’t have decided to screw their customers in the first place. And you wouldn’t have to worry about Steinberg having too many users, or users who do not have a sufficiently pure love of Steinberg products.
The more companies that suffer for poor treatment of their clients and customers, the better the world will be for everyone. Example: Makemusic is offering a competitve crossgrade for Sibelius users, and it is a very very tempting offer; I can crossgrade from my very old version of Sibelius to the latest Finale for $139. Are they being unethical for making such an offer? Will I be unethical when I take advantage of it? Don’t make me laugh.
So the best thing for everyone, except the people who run Avid - and people like them - would be for Avid to suffer as much as possible for their antics. And Steinberg offering a crossgrade could, maybe, help that wonderful dream come true.
Easy now, let’s be respectful! Disagree, be passionate, but leave the “labels” outside, please.
It is nothing wrong about offering a PT to Nuendo crossgrade at all. Perfect timing in my book.
PS. But how is Fredo now going about moderate this thread. And all other threads in which he strongly argument.
Trying to be an ordinary forum member and a moderator at once is no good combination, ethically speaking 
Nah, it’s business my friend.
A big marketing event/stunt and a good PT to Nuendo crossgrade ASAP, is the way to go IMO.
No, Fredo is not foolish … but he is robust and says his piece which is quite ok, even if it is, refreshingly, not always the opinion of other businessmen who have gone harder over the time.
Yes, it is all business … and …should there be a little incentive for existing Nuendees?
YES! … lol … Payed for by the revenue comming from the cross grade sales.
Big K ( whose virtual booties are worn by equally kicking SB & Alsihad)
In exact the same way as I have always done.
By trying to keep my integrety.
What I personally think has nothing to do with the job I am doing here.
Fredo
That’s probably not what he was talking about. As a user you do one thing and then you turn around as a moderator and tell other people not to do the same. You can have “integrity” in the sense that you voice your opinion honestly, nobody doubts that, but as a moderator when you act like that there’s more “inconsistency” rather than “integrity”.
Yeah, you are correct.
I am sorry I conflict with your personal morals.
Not that I’m going for Seppuku though…
Fredo
The above is the new level of discourse you prefer? Or is it once again reserved for the moderator only?
Of course consistently baiting the moderator is kind of a fool’s errand.
Back to the matter at hand, c’mon Steinberg, this is the PERFECT time for a crossgrade offer!!!
I have only seen arguments why I shouldn’t follow ethics and my own morals.
Which is something different than questioning and discussing the morals by itself.
Trying to keep my integrety also means respecting the opinion of someone else.
Yours and Steinbergs’.
If Steinberg would offer a crossgrade offer now, then I would be able to live with that.
But that wouldn’t change anything about my opinion on the subject.
You do not share my opinion, but I can’t see why this should result in a -negative- politics agenda.
I do not share your opinion, but that still doesn’t mean I will ban you from this forum.
So let’s put this to rest.
I don’t think a crossgrade now a good idea, you do think it is a good idea.
So we agree to disagree. That should have been the final conclusion. Done and over with.
There is absolutely no need to turn this into a politics war, so one of both can come out of this “fight” as a winner.
So I think we have to put this discussion to an end.
If you still want to say something, do it polite and respectful.
But I would prefer that it stops here and now.
Have a nice weekend.
Fredo
Fredo, the problem with your analogy, well one problem, is that the soccer player will recover, or a substitute will be sent in and the quality of the team will be pretty much instantly restored. And, you specifically considering what Avid has done a self-injury. Who are we to say? Maybe they planned that they would lose X amount of customers and still come out ahead based on (severely) increase revenue?
As I recall, Avid has had a few miserable years in terms of profit. I imagine investors are getting antsy about it. This is a something of a desperate move to gin up profits. Is that an injury? Or is it a lack of innovation? The users are the ones facing an injury. The choices they are being offered result in a LOT more money out of their pockets just to maintain the level of service they already have. To offer them a better solution for their business needs is not an unfair taking advantage of Avid, it’s making a life-line available to their customers for whom the new paradigm really isn’t an option.
Anyway, this is partly SB’s fault as they should’ve had a crossgrade in place all along. So if there is a feeling of impropriety because Avid is vulnerable…what it really is is a tremendous missed opportunity on the part of SB. Magix and others have standing crossgrades. THAT is simply good business.
Another perspective is, win/lose or draw, both Soccer teams will be back next year to try again. Avid/Digi has certainly offered a business-ending threat to SB in the past. SB has innovated their way through it and at least up until now, not shot themselves in the foot by forcing their customers into such a horrible deal. LOL! Imagine if we had all been on a subscription when it took…how long to go from N4 to N5? Imagine if SB has rushed the software out crippled (PT11) because of the subscription?
I waited years to purchase PT. Finally with PT11 I jumped on board because they FINALLY had found a price vs feature match that made it even plausible. Now? There’s no way in hell I’m paying every year regardless of what they develop. PT11 is still flakey and unstable. AND they released it before there were any plugins available for it! There still aren’t many AAX DSP plugs. I know a studio who moved from HD to HDX…all his projects just crashed on opening because they all went from DSP to Native even though he shelled out for an HDX system. The plugs just weren’t/aren’t available. And now they want more money before any of this has been fixed/addressed? (That studio in now investing heavily in hardware solutions, even things like time-based effects).
This is Avid causing a trainwreck by diverting 2 trains carrying all their passengers into each other at full speed and then charging the families to carry away the dead. They have a broken or at least underdeveloped product that most of the professional industry relies on, and they are looking for profits before offering a solution.
You want to talk about unethical? LOL.
Who is/are you personally, and who is/are you as a moderator? That’s what I’m talking about.
I have a hard time seeing that in one moment “a moderator” is a regular user, in the next he is a moderator.
This has VERY much to do with where the line is drawn (what is acceptable and not), whether the thread/posts are suiteable to your liking or not (seen it more than once). It is just not avoidable (we are humans).
That’s why these two roles shouldn’t be mixed up.
PS. This is not aimed at Fredo personally.
THIS GOES FOR ALL MODERATORS OF ALL FORUMS, that also act as a regular forum member.
Have you ever seen how the language of former forum members have changed (sometimes radically) after being promoted as External Moderators?
If not, take a closer look.
In terms of attracting PT users, I feel that as Nuendo users ourselves it’s on us to inform and educate the folks we work with and around.
One tiny stumbling block is the e-licenser thing. I’ve convinced a friend that owns a successful sound library company that in terms of efficiency, Nuendo is absolutely light years ahead of ProTools. The idea of ordering an e-licenser for $40, waiting for it, then using it to check out the very awesome 500 free hours of Nuendo, although not a big deal to people who already have Nuendo, seems a bit clunky. The amount of time is absolutely perfect in terms of a demo, I just wish there was an easier way for people to play immediately.
But seriously - I’ll do a screen share with him, help him set up outputs and cycle markers and his work process will see a very gracious boost in efficiency, making his hour more valuable.
And that’s how I convinced the last facility I worked at that Nuendo was the right choice - I completed more billable work per hour in Nuendo, not do to my skill set or having more familiarity with ProTools (10+ years), but because of the tools available to me right from the start. Now that I’m freelance, the same applies, though in order to be part of teams I have no choice but to use ProTools.
That brings me to another point -
Gaming - I know Guerrilla Games (Killzone) uses Nuendo in their studios. I had a chance to meet with Anton Woldhek at GDC this year and we had great discussions about how we use Batch Export and Cycle Marker Export to output game elements in as many flavors possible as efficiently as possible. Game composer Guy Whitmore has literally just ditched ProTools for all the reasons we’ve listed here for Nuendo - the Facebook Game Audio Denizens page totally blew up after that post - Mark Kilborn (Raven Software, COD), Rodney Gates (Sony Online), Rob Pearsall. I don’t know if I feel like Steinberg is dropping the ball here with gaming a little bit as much as I don’t feel like they’re as aggressive as they can be, especially right now. PT users are starting to understand that offline bounce is small change compared to what we can do and how we can do it in Nuendo - it’s literally a completely new workflow. Maybe that’s what’s so intimidating - I’ve met few to no ProTools users that are at all interested in learning another DAW, same response - “Why would I learn another tool? That’s time and money wasted when I can already do all that with ProTools.” I feel like that should be Steinberg’s rally cry.
Anyways - I think there might be a benefit to making the demo just a bit more immediately accessible (40+ free hours until e-licenser comes?) and jumping in to some more post and game studios that use Nuendo specifically for the features that other tools do not have.
Cheers!