Been chatting to current and ex NI employee mates about the state of them for years. Since the CI and the racist marketing scandal its been a bit toxic. A few years ago a mate working for them on the stand at Superbooth here in Berlin said the CEO was fired after not making enough shareholder dividends. Think he only been there for a short time. The CI thing kinda fucked it. Has been a sinking ship for a few years. Same thing kinda happened to Digidesign / Avid years ago. At least Yamaha didnt screw Steinberg that badly. Ableton had loads of problems recently. There was a corporate restructure of the entire business due to liquidity issues post pandemic. A lot of the senior team at Ableton fled shortly after, many to L'Acosutics. Mind you Dirk Ulrich from Plug-in Alliance and Brainworkz seems to do well out of the NI CI thing. He recently brought Manley Labs. However clunky Kontakt is / was the engine was still well engineered. Timur Doumler played a large pat in that I believe, then he left to join the JUCE team at ROLI.
DE insolvency law is complicated. One of the DE audio colleges I freelanced at for years went down two years ago. If there is asset sell off its controlled by the government appointment lawyers. The NI board dont get much say. I guess the 3rd party lib devs will pull their IP out. Absynth 6 is fairly new so I guess as it was a dev partnership with Brian Clevinger may he can salvage his IP.
Not good news for audio industry the week of NAMM but I guess we might expect an upsurge in devs flipping to HISE.
P
