indiescore:
look at native instruments, their core product line is very strong, but when they try to widen their reach and dabble with a range of expansion packs, then the products sound sub par, or redundant, for example any of their accoustic drums or strings expansions can’t hold a torch to the major players in that space like lass, Hollywood strings, bfd, toon track sup drummer because those players specialize. Exception being heavocity however I think ni is just a distributor for them. I see a similar pattern here with sb, exception , pad shop and retro lounge are very good synths in my opinion, and the scoring software development is an important pursuit, otherwise would rather see them focus on the improving the flagships and bring in Yamaha for digital console innovation, maybe develop other control and hardware interfaces …
Weird, I see it the other way around, just out of curiosity can you tell me which recent Steinberg products “sound sub par, or redundant” ? Halion 5 is great, fab even, Cubasis about the only usable sequencer on the iPad and all of their recent plugins with the possible exception of the Yamaha Vintage collection are excellent (only tried YVC for a short while, so …), I have not tried a recent WaveLab but the reviews it gets are outstanding so I assume it is at the least OK.
Even Sequel is actually rather well done, some of the hardware releases may not be for everyone but I could not finger one of them as sub-par, and at the least here in the UK as far as quality and price/bang for the buck is concerned the only USB/Firewire interfaces that beat the Steinberg offerings are those insanely priced new Behringer units.
In fact it is the management and, erm … “vision” of the company that has impressed me the most in the last few years, they are open about things and provide free dev toolkits, and each new version has bought functionality updates that allow you to do something new with their software, VST3 and VST expressions have changed the way I work meaning that going to another DAW basically feels like going back in time and their hiring of the UK Avid Sibelius team was a touch of genius.
As for making professional software music tools, Steinberg is the only company left that even bothers to translate their products, I mean, it is the only DAW available in Chinese is Cubendo, to give an idea of the size of the Chinese market, 50m Chinese go onto the internet for the first time each year , that is more people than are on-line here in the UK in total, and we are supposed to be a “large market”. Remember all the USA CAD vendors of yesteryear, only the one that actually supported local distributors in localising their products survived (Autodesk), the others got eaten alive by European vendors, if someone had told me in the 80’s that the 2 biggest providers of industrial CAD/CAM would be Siemens and Dassault of all companies, I would have laughed my heart out, ditto for a German company (SAP) being the largest vendor of business software in the world.
I am quite willing to believe that the 800 pound gorilla in the room will remain to be Steinberg by 2020, they actually appear to have a plan, and separate development teams for separate products, the rest of the DAW industry just seems incoherent in their development strategies in comparison, some like Cakewalk appear not to have even a short term plan and MOTU and AVID are delivering architectural changes to their products more than a decade later than Steiny.
I used to run a number of sequencers, by now I only have Cubase and Energy-XT as a plugin, I think that shows something.