My new year wishes for NI

Kymeia · 2025-01-01T12:41:39+00:00

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While I am a big user of NI products for many years now and heavily invested in the Komplete ecosystem it seems to me that in places the ecosystem hangs together more tenuously than I would like. This I think is what leads to so many problems users experience. Examples:

Kontakt 8 has Leap and Tools but they can only be accessed in Komplete Kontrol via the software interface, which means while they can be used with earlier keyboards you need to go into Komplete Kontrol and then the K8 browser to load them which is very clunky.

Kontakt snapshots from third party developers and user saved losing path information when loaded in Komplete Kontrol

Komplete Kontrol getting a browser influenced by Konkakt 7's Library browser, but as a consequence, taking away drag and drop functionality

Komplete Kontrol being able to load fx but not having an effect version or even fx automation or the ability to save chains

Maschine still being incapable of fully supporting the features of NI keyboards, even the latest MkIII models, such as aftertouch support and browsing Maschine 3 plugins and sounds from the keyboard

Massive X also does not integrate well with even the latest NI keyboards, you have to go into settings and change aftertouch from poly to mono to even be able to play it (and it still does not work properly at all in Maschine because Maschine does not even support mono aftertouch)

Older products such as Battery having developed incompatibilities with Komplete Kontrol and Maschine

I think while the intention behind the Komplete ecosystem is a good one, there is too much of a silo'd approach to app development which leads to situations like this where several product lines are out of alignment. So my new year wish is for NI to work towards a more joined up approach where each development team is considering the ecosystem as a whole rather than a piecemeal one where developments in one area are at the expense of developments elsewhere.

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Comments

DunedinDragon

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've said and I do believe NI knows this all needs improvement. As a person that comes from a commercial product development background I honestly feel for NI during this time period given all that's been transpiring within the industry such as converging on new standards with MIDI and VST's. That means the race is on for all companies in this segment to get cohesive products out that deliver on these promises while at the same time trying to deliver new advancements in their current product line.

It reminds me of what I experienced in the 80's and 90's as computer systems began to get smaller and more powerful and standards for interoperability between different computers began to emerge and then the overwhelming promise of the Internet as it began to become a reality on every desktop. Balancing the demands from users for more features while trying to envision how to best incorporate all these new standards was a very daunting task and often the industry didn't guess correctly resulting in the failure of MASSIVE leaders in the industry such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang Laboratories along with the total retooling of the core business models of giants like IBM.

I don't think we're quite at that level yet, but it's still a fairly sizeable gorilla in the room right now. Especially when you begin to ponder the potential impact of how to design and incorporate the promise and capabilities of generative AI and how that shapes into your product line.

But that's the business NI has chosen to be in, but I do hope users can be a little understanding about what is boiling in the background and learn to be patient and encouraging. It's going to be rough for a little bit of time right now.

Sunborn

+1 from me!

All those you wrote can be summarize in 3 (and only 3) cases:

Either NI developers are short-sighted (which is hard to believe)
Either they do not interact between them in order that the products successfully overlap with each other
Either the owners do not allow them to do so

One of the above is the root of the problem.

And it is a shame because the products themselves are of the highest quality.

DunedinDragon

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/201404#Comment_201404

I have to disagree or at least limit my judgement simply because I don't really understand how their development efforts are organized, but given what I experienced as outlined in my response I'd give a lot of weight to available bandwidth on the development team and the need to give users at least some of the things they can deliver now. That's the most typical situation in the conditions they're dealing with. That often leads to prioritization differences between what different individual users might want and what their marketing efforts indicate for the broader market. And the focus of where they feel they need to drive the products.

I personally think, based on what I've seen recently, they seem to be much more driven toward addressing the DJ and Dance audiences in the products they're bringing out possibly because they see that as a bigger opportunity for new users, but that's just a guess from my observations.

JesterMgee

NI will never have a cohesive suite of products, the fact they can't justify the time to even integrate Maschine and KK anymore or try and push it with better features that compliment each other should be a pretty glaring sign that they are not delivering what users actually want, at least, not listening to ANY input is a big problem.

Should be pretty clear by now that the whole KK eco system is not designed to make user lives "easier" it is more to just tie in other devs with the marketing and deliver more sample packs and kontact based instruments. Asking users to "be patient and good things will happen" is what many of us HAVE been doing for 10+ years, still waiting there big Dawg.

We are now back waiting to just have features put BACK again that were there 2 years ago. But what's another 10 years of waiting…

Mark Oxley

The general lack of support for many existing products coupled with huge disappointments in recent software and hardware development has forced me away from using NI products.

I hope they get a grip and changes for the better are afoot.

Beatsandmore

The fact they have no allowed kontrol mk3 to be fully functional in maschine 3.1 is a true sign they rather sell as many controller for each peice of software only.. if they allow full functionality with the kontrol keyboard then many of us would just choose one which in my eyes NI don't want..

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/201937#Comment_201937

The fact is Maschine has never been fully integrated with NI keyboards, not MkII or III. Neither have most of NIs plugin instruments. I don’t think it is about making people need both, in fact I think that would be a dumb motivation on their part as I for one would be much more interested in having a Maschine hardware device if it did integrate better with Kontrol keyboards, it’s the lack of integration that puts me off, and I’m sure I am not alone. I think they are shooting themselves in the foot by this short term, silo’d, thinking.

LostInFoundation

I think the main mistake we continue to make is thinking NI is still what it used to be. It is not.

Less developers. Less skills. Less long-sightedness.

All of this comes from one single root: less money invested.

We should have seen this coming when we read the news about the massive firing and entire teams getting closed years ago. And also some of the genius developers leaving.

If you pay for Ronaldo and some other good players, you get a good football team. If you think “you know what: this other guy is also a football player and he costs less. And if we play in 5 instead of 11, it also costs less”, the level decreases.

This all comes down from the difference in someone opening a company and wanting to see it grow (even accepting this means making investments that will pay off only later) and Private Equity just making calculations on how to earn money fast. Sadly…one of the main ways to do it is cutting on expenses (not being interested in what this means in long term).
Good and numerically adequate personnel, developing products internally instead of contracting out to other existing companies, good support and taking responsibility of releasing good products (and of fixing what didn’t work) are a good slice of a company expenses.

I feel for the people working there (probably they are doing the best they can with the little they are given).

But I feel even more for users…

LostInFoundation

Therefore, my only new year (utopic) wish for NI is just one: somebody really interested in the company (and not just the money) acquiring it.

I’m sure this would solve a lot of the issues.

Or…someone in the company so brave to show to the Private Equity guys all of these critics and them understanding what they are doing is the key to a failure.

Even more utopic…

Vagus

The challenge is, given that NI now also includes Izotope, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance, there's only two ways the future of Native Instruments goes.

A) A larger music technology firm or larger VC aquires them.
B) They float on a stock market for 1) return for SF/EMH Partners, or 2) ROI on the original investment in a partial float.

Neither of this is easy at the scale NI is at, nor is the development of a host of products with a lot of tech debt (Kontakt, KK, Machine, Reaktor). NI and Izotope have some serious research credentials within their teams, but it seems a lot of other companies are bringing product to market based on research, where NI is bringing new instruments to Kontakt and expansions, over revitalised older product lines, or new product lines.

They have worked behind the scenes on new things. Take Sound Stacks. Originally started a few years back, and a subsidary of NI. It's turnover is not insignificant, but neither is its outupt. It's a company making a loss, supported by its parent, but we haven't seen, or publically been told what they've been up to. Some of it might already be making its way into the tools we're working with, with Native UI, or CMajor (in partnership perhaps, because that's where the Sound Stacks guys went).

However, there is a detatchment between what the users want, and what the owners want, because to be blunt and speaking from experience with VC, SF Partners / EMH will unlikely be super involved. They will have targets, and they will have goals; neither is likely a long term owner, so will expect an exit at some stage. A wise investor exits on the up; but the entire Music Technology sector is becoming more fragmented.

I would bet on NI aqquiring smaller brands before a sale, but that's highly dependent on what the owner wants to do.

Vagus

Things I would wish NI to do this year:

1. Bring 3rd parties to Native Access and the website storefront. You have millions of users, and no single store has captured the market like Steam has for gaming. Build a storefront API and a 3rd party marketing team, and turnover and profit goes up (20% is fine. Steam is stingy at 30%).

2. Open up the NKS ecosystem with proper authoring tools for users, and creators. This will also help with #1 above. Greater access to users + greater access to potential sales = greater adoption of NKS standards. The world doesn't run on Kontakt anymore (despite strong sales). Embrace the new, including CLAP with Machine/KK and live up to "the future of sound".

3. There are so many talented people at NI. Let's hear from them more often. Simon posting a company update once every three months is great for a CPO internally. But how about a foward looking statement from those involved in each product (sorry Simon). It is far easiler to sell products to an audience already invested in your products, who then evangelise to others.

4. Create a dedicated support forum, or redirect new threads automatically to your support system. All I see is support requests on the forum now. This means it's in the place you want it, or your support system isn't working ass efficiently as you and probably your support team would like. I speak from experience when I say, it's easier for community managers to excel at growing and supporting community when that community isn't faced with support threads on almost every forum category, instead of collaborating with others in the community.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/40768/my-new-year-wishes-for-ni

I think that when discussions has been going on then Matthew_NI has written it more times that 'the number/user-statistics say this or that and Matthew_NI has apparently used this as basis for decisions and for prioritizing. That paired with that it has all become the art of the possible for the developers of both software and hardware has made it so that the 'perfection' that users in the present discussion seeks/wants either will not happen or it will only happen if a situation arrives where developers do not have much else to do of importance/higher priority. Since we do not know all the plans and we are not privy to all lists of priority - only what we are told then that makes it mostly impossible to to tell what things and features will be made.

At the moment then it appears as if what is made is the most important, what is most used and what is most popular and N.I. generally do not have any focus on fulfilling the wishes from e.g. 'expert users' if there is not many of these users/if there is not much sale in it.

I myself in opinion here, on this matter and on how things ought to be , am aligned with JesterMgee, Kymeia and Sunborn , but I still expect that what we will see first and foremost will be what user-statistics say is popular , most used and sells the most HW and SW.

LostInFoundation

What they don’t get is that if they let the “containers” (Maschine, KK, Kontakt) slowly become less and less interesting, they will not be able to even sell the products that depend on them and that their “data collection” says are the milking cows.

They are so lucky to have ereditate some really important products their predecessors have created: NKS, Kontakt, Maschine and an ecosystem in which hardware/software integration was really the focus (it seems they have forgotten even this). Those are the things that made NI big and allowed them to sell Expansions and Libraries.
But you can’t continue to sell Maschine Expansions if you let Maschine slowly die…

And if they lose the things that make their Expansions and NKS Libraries stand out compared to others, they just become “normal” Sound packs and Libraries…of which we have plenty of choice elsewhere…
If you sit on your laurels and decide to prioritize only products that are an easy cash flow, you won’t last too long. Nowadays users have too many competitors to chose from.

Specially if what you release is not well done/well tested/innovative.

You can’t release half baked products just to bring immediate cash in and then say “it will become better later”... Users are not THAT stupid: fool them once, fool them twice…and then they learn… and go look elsewhere. And instead of evangelizing, they’ll trash talk. And your sales will decrease even more. Which is what is already happening.

If Mercedes wants to sell their leather seats, it must be sure drivers own their cars…otherwise they’ll sit on some other brand… The engine must be nice and good, not because it’s the thing that makes you earn the money, but because it allows you to sell everything else (the seats, the gear knob, the air conditioner, the car body,…). And there you’ll make the money. They can’t say “the luxury interiors are where we gain most money, so let’s sell only this”. They need a structure where the luxury can be mounted.

It’s the proverbial snake biting its own tail

Sunborn

Strangely, i agree with everyone so far. So, this is real, we all see it.
It is not just "complains from ignorant newbies" anymore.

The way i see it, the real root of the problem is, I suppose, that it left European hands and went into greedy, "hard-core businesses" ones. This is always the root of a problem: bureaucrats and accountants vs. creators

Tom Collins

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/202013#Comment_202013

I really hope they will take up the support forum idea, all the great posts are drowned in support posts all the time

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