[sdiy] ot: is it true that Waldorf crashed?

[Richard Wentk]

At 16:39 19/02/2004 +0000, Paul Maddox wrote:
>Grant,
>
> > In the millions of US$. It was the Q that killed them.
>
>IMHO, the AFB16 did it...

I expect it seemed like a good idea at the time.

>I think the other thing that killed them was that they never ever really
>'finished' anything..
>People will only put up with that kinda trick for so long..

I think when you have five people working on various old and new projects, 
finishing anything takes longer than you'd want it to. Then you're stuck 
between running out of cash flow and getting not-quite-there-yet products out.

The tried and tested (or not) approach is to let the punters do the 
debugging. As long as they don't take things back to the store, you get a 
cash injection, the punters get toys they can kinda sorta use, and everyone 
is kinda sorta happy.

Except when you push it too hard, which is what Waldorf did.

Besides, the market for monster God synths is very small and shrinking 
rapidly, so it's not something a smart company would want to do right now. 
If they'd redone the Q+ as a plug-in and sold it online for £249 there 
might have been some hope.

>As for the software argument, sorry, Microsoft continue to grow,
>Access-music continue to grow, VSTi's are getting more popular, Steinberg
>are growing and so on...
>Most mobile phones rely heavily on software, and you can't say that area of
>business is in decline!

I think considering how much software is being used everyday, often for 
(literally) mission critical applications, quality control wouldn't seem to 
be a major issue. Does s/ware really fail more than h/ware?

Microsoft aside of course. But MS is a kind of meta-company that sells its 
own marketing hype first, and then does some usually quite random product 
design as a kind of afterthought.

Richard