General responses are that is was inevitable and coming.
I am by no means in full understanding of the inner workings of corporate business, specially in the media field.
But if anything, my opinion would be that this is the opportune time for Steinberg to step up their game.
What you sayz ??
At this point just about the only problem I have with Steinberg is QC and Beta, and then keeping an eye on bugs that creep up and not just dealing with them asap but also communicating that with the user base.
I think marketing is somewhat better than it used to be, and there seems to be a relatively healthy long term vision being implemented. From what I understand Japan’s Yamaha isn’t a nimble fast moving ship, so perhaps it is to the users’ advantage compared to having a bunch of shortsighted greedy investment types running the ship.
But yeah, I’ve said it before; I think Steinberg and Yamaha could be way more aggressive in trying to get customers from Avid. Of course, it goes back to the very first thing I wrote which a requirement before anyone even thinks about switching apps.
I feel sorry for the people. AVOID has a history of wrong management decisions that have lead to the situation. On the net we can read that the CEO and CFO are taking home $10m dollars a year. It’s about time users and avid employees show those thiefs to @&#% off.
There’s a lot of truth there… On several occasions when i’ve had a logic or PT user here they usually scoff at cubase… until… they see what it can do, the look on their faces is usually hilarious too! a bit like the scene in total recall where arnie has the robotic female head on and it looses it… VERY funny to watch!! They have no idea just how expansive cubase is by comparison. Either those people are working in a highly closed ecosystem (which is highly possible being most of them are mac based) and/or ‘YamaBerg’ just aren’t reaching/convincing enough with their marketing as stated.
I recently came over to Nuendo as I’m doing more and more work for film, animation and games. So I think I have a pretty “outsider” view on things.
My opinion here is really only from my point of view. I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and I haven’t followed AVID closely. But I always looked at PT and “tried” to get in and use it and like it. But it never worked. So take my opinion with a grain of salt of somebody sitting at a bar, saying what his favorite football club should do better, because it’s much easier when you’re at a bar than in the trainer’s shoes 
I’m pretty sad AVID has such a bad management. They kept their software elite and closed so it was very hard to get in. The problem with that is, when you have very few people that get in, and your user base gets older and older, one day your users will just die out. They try to overcome this noe with PT|First, but it’s too little too late. First feels like a demo version. I think you are forced to save projects to their cloud, and you can only have 3 projects at a time. Then you need to delete one. It really feels like a demo. You’d try it out and then move on. I think AVID in the past had such a closed system and high entry fee with their forced bundle hardware that only very few people but big studios could even afford it. Now they opened it, you don’t need hardware anymore, but I tried to make sense of their website. What version do I need, what is the difference in functionality and cost? It’s a big mess. AVID has a hard time getting away from their old model of thinking. All the info is convoluted and hard to understand. I tried getting demo versions but the software feels as if it’s stuck in the 80s. Before you hear anything from the timeline, you have to go into several menus and setup audio routing. Something other products do a lot better. You just start Logic and most of the routing things are done automatically with the ability to change it, if necessary. Nut you don’t need to spend half an hour figuring out in what menu you need to change things in order to hear something. We’re not in the analog days anymore, software can do much more and dynamically react to situations so companies don’t have to burden the user with daunting useless tasks if software can do it for them. And then, on several of my machines, PT just crashed. Constantly! On my laptop, I even opened an empty project and PT complained that it runs out of memory. At the same time, I can open quite big projects in Nuendo and Logic with no memory problems. Conclusion: Crashes, a vast amount of manual setup steps for every little bit - no thanks. It might be the industry standard, but they’re behind the times.
I get that pro users really like slow moving software. After all, you don’t want to re-learn a new user paradigm and new UI every year with every version. And re-educate all your staff. It’s expensive and in the middle of a production you don’t want to touch anything. So AVID can really only add small features per version, and then has to sell them at a high price in order to keep their teams paid. Here some new MIDI functions, here some new color to a menu. The system needs to stay the same for users to feel at home and not overwhelmed. It’s not easy being a standard, I guess, when you have to move with the speed of a glacier.
At the same time I’m really astonished about what Nuendo can do. I loved and still love Logic. It’s very versatile, feels modern. And frankly I personally don’t mind learning new things with a new release. If this means you can do certain mundane tasks that previously took 5 minutes in 30 seconds, hell yes. Even if I need to re-think a lot of workflows that are in my head. It keeps my brain trained But Logic lacks movie features. Its AAF and OMF import / export are abysmal to the point of not usable. Functions you need in film post or when working with large amounts of regions and files, like file management, or a “MediaBay” are practically non-existant. In Nuendo, I can go and re-name all my regions with a specific naming scheme. Export several tracks with auto-naming. It has great management capabilities for large projects, regions, files. It’s so great and I haven’t even begun scratching the surface.
The only thing I would like to see is a little more re-factoring at the back end. I find several visual cues in Cubase and Nuendo look outdated. The EQ, the channel strip view, this constant opening and closing of areas in the inspector costs a lot of mouse clicks. And while in Logic I can just send an audio channel to a new bus, which dynamically creates a new bus channel and routes the channel to it, in Nuendo, I have to go through menus to create a new bus. And then force it to Mono or Stereo. Logic just assumes a config based on the channel you’re sending to the bus, but with one click you can reconfigure a bus to Stereo or Surround from Mono or vice-versa. When I go into a config menu in Nuendo, it feels very Windows 95-ish. Old looking controls, convoluted menus. There’s a lot more under the hood of course, but I think there’s a big potential to clean up a lot of things to make workflow and usability better and make the software as a whole more easy to understnad and to work a lot quicker with it.
We’re not in the days of analog hardware anymore, where software needs to mimic cables, connections and stuff. All of us work with computers for a long time now and we understand that some things can be more abstract. It seems some software vendors try to keep “the real world” around so that we understand what’s going on and can relate that to the real world: “Aha, I just plugged a virtual cable here, and created a bus deliberately. OK”. When in fact, that’s not necessary. In software, I can split, re-route, move, copy, send audio any way I like with just a click. If I have a great visualization of it in a menu, it’s a lot faster than going to menus, creating busses, assigning them a static configuration of mono, stereo, surround, and THEN using it in the Sends area. Software is dynamic and can quickly adapt to a situation without the user to go through several menus. Cubase recently got an update with several workflow improvements. This is something that can be applied big time to Nuendo, too. There’s so much that could be done in a better way. And I’d like to see progress in this area. Making it easier to access, better and easier to use and understand a feature.
But I realize, Nuendo of course is also used in huge movie productions. So probably it’s in user’s and Steinberg’s interest not to move too quickly. We’ll still have the virtual equivalent of cables around for a long time.
Nice post that, I don’t normally read posts that long on a topic I don’t really care about 
Business is business at the end of the day… there will always be collateral damage when one fails. Whilst it may seem “unjust” to its victims, its going to happen to most entities sooner or later. Do PT users feel fleeced yet? Sad but true.
And standards will change.