réactions à la news Bon anniversaire Cakewalk

My theory is, a lot of products start off — like Cakewalk for DOS version 1.0 — or maybe Ableton Live version 1.0 — in the beginning, it’s extremely focused and they can only do a few things. But the few things they do, they do very well. And it attracts people who only want to do those things, and for them, it’s perfect — it has everything they need and nothing they don’t need getting in the way.

But over time, as you try to listen to customers and try to accommodate their requests, the product becomes the union and the sum total of all the requests you’ve received over the years. If you could hit the fast forward button, go out five or ten versions, it won’t be that original, really simple — perfect-for-some-people — product that it started off as. I think some companies are able to do a better job of taming that complexity and not letting it get out of control. But it’s pretty hard after 10, 15, 20 years of adding feature requests. That’s a real challenge.

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I think for Cakewalk there was a period where people knew that we made software that was easy to use, but I don’t think we got credit for being as innovative as we actually were. At times I felt kind of bad for our software engineers (This was the part where I wasn’t writing code any more.) I felt like they’re creating these really amazing things, but we’re not getting credit for it. People might recognize a product like Cubase or Logic as being very innovative, but we had done the same thing two years before. So it seemed like we were maybe a little invisible with the power user community.

That was part of the motivation of doing SONAR. The later era of what was called Cakewalk Pro Audio, 6, 7, 8, 9, I think particularly then we felt that people are recognizing that our product was easy to use, but they were saying, if you’re a real power user, you don’t want to use Cakewalk, you want to use Cubase. After I while that gets to you a little bit. I think that’s changed; [we’re] making sure people realize the power user features that we have. Of course, the irony is, as we did that, there’s a group of people looking at Ableton Live saying, wow, this is really cool, it’s really easy to use, it doesn’t have all these features in SONAR or Logic. I think the moral of the story is, there’s not one type of customer, and not one type of product that’s right for everyone. You need to pick your vision, and that may change over time, and may evolve. You’re not going to please everyone all of the time, and that’s fine.

keep the simple things simple and hide the complexity.

My interest in music led me to an interest in computer programming, which led me to an interest in business.