Has NI Lost It's Way?
As a dedicated MPC enthusiast, with a collection that included the MPC 60, MPC 60II, and the MPC 3000 with a chip upgrade, I found myself increasingly disenchanted with the slow evolution of their operating systems. This restlessness led me to discover the NI Maschine in a music store, newly released at the time. It was a revelation — a game changer that I immediately had to own. Bringing it home, I quickly realized that Maschine was not just a match for the MPC but also offered much more. It became a pivotal tool in my studio for years, aiding in the production of some fantastic music.
However, fast forward to today, and my enthusiasm for Maschine is waning. My sentiment towards NI is evolving into a blend of fatigue and frustration. I sense a loss of the original passion that NI once radiated. The fact that MPC introduced the STEMs feature before NI — a company traditionally known for being a step ahead — is astonishing. NI, once a leader, now appears to be lagging, possibly becoming complacent, perhaps even veering towards greed and, dare I say, laziness.
NI's strength has always been its innovative software, yet now they seem sluggish in launching new features. This lethargy opens the door for MPC to reclaim the customers it once lost. Having observed the market for a long time, I've seen formidable companies like Blockbuster, Echard Drug, and Emu lose their edge due to comfort and complacency. NI Maschine, it's critical to return to your roots, to reignite the spirit of innovation that defined you. Your customers' needs and desires seem to be falling on deaf ears, a critical error in any business. It's high time for a rejuvenation, a recommitment to innovation, and a reconnection with your user base.
Comments
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I share your concern. I don’t think NI have lost their way. Instead, they have simply decided to focus less on Maschine and more on their keyboards and virtual instruments. After all, they dropped Maschine support from their S series keyboards. That, and the fact that there haven’t been substantial updates to Maschine for a few years now, is an indication that Maschine is no longer a priority.
The S series upgrade was an opportunity to solidify those keyboards as a central single workhorse in a studio, including for songwriting and arrangement (features available via Maschine on the previous generation keyboard) . Instead of strengthening that unique position of the keyboards by improving the Maschine DAW, they basically abandoned that route.
This to me indicates that the long term future of Maschine is uncertain. The pattern/ideas/song arrangement workflow is what distinguishes it most from the MPC platform, and in my view the main reason to choose it above the latter. Now that NI seems to have stopped investing in the Maschine SW, that selling point is weakened. AKAI becomes increasingly attractive. MPC and Force are dynamic platforms with regular updates and new features. Maschine seems end-of-life.
I really - really - hope I am wrong, but am currently no longer spending any money on NI and not starting any new work on Maschine.
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As a Kontakt and GR user, I can understand, since these 2 products exploded in reputation, money and popularity, they decided to focus on these products a lot, to the point when they started losing the concentration on Maschine.
I mean, EA did the same thing with the Ultimate Team on their EA SPORTS games.
Once the Ultimate team got them serious cash, they ignored their free to play audience.
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It will be interesting to see how Akai manages to provide frequent feature updates for an existing user base for free once their hardware market niche is saturated.
No more sales. No more income. No more development.
Which is pretty much the situation of NI. And cross funding product lines is not something financiers want to do.
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Guitar Rig exploded? I didn't know it was that commonly used..
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Things can be seen also in the opposite direction.
No more development. No more sales. No more income.
I think what many companies fail to see is that updates don’t HAVE TO be free. They could ask the right price for the development and the updates to existing products. Instead, they prefer to make users think they are offering new products. Probably because this is what users want. Consumerism is a thing. Or probably because selling a “new” product (which in fact has just few additions to the previous one) has a bigger profit margin than asking the right price for the work done for adding to existing products
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i think most of us are sharing your concern – with a good reason. on the one side, you'll see the mpc platform progressing in a steady pace, and on the other side, the maschine soft and hardware section is left out dry, with no noteworthy development since 2 years.
could be they decided to stop investing/developing the platform because they are focused on other stuff.
i still like using the maschine+ and think it's a great device to produce music, but i also do think it's at the end-of-life with nothing coming in the near or not so near future.
if akai is keep pushing their platform at this pace, there won't be a lot of new maschine users anyway. some years ago, we saw the opposite, when akai dropped the ball with the mpc 5000 and the mpc renaissance.
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NI is not a person, its a company, and I dont even know if anyone who was with the company during its glory days still work there. Therefore it's not exactly logical to assume it will keep on having the same attitude, passions and priorities as it once had.
I kind of find it funny that people always want to be "on the winning team" - If a product X gets feature Y and the proiduct you are currently using doesn't get it, this talk about switching platforms always starts. For me personally, that feature X was not something I considered essential to have when I decided to pick product Y, and the product still does what it always has, why drop it just because of a new thing? Grass aint always greener on the other side..
It is unfortunate that current NI has very different priorities than the NI of yesteryear. But it is what it is
Not tyring to apologise for NI, just my personal view on the subject. NI could do better, and should, but.. yeah
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Well...you got a great point there...
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NI is much, much more than Maschine. I think for a while NI did think that Maschine was what they should focus on... but thank goodness they came to their senses.
Maschine can and will live on.. but it should not be NI's defining product by any means.
It is a limited, niche tool.. not nearly as musically universal as NI needs to be.
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I agree with some of what you say (op), but you say greed and I say value for money. You can easily spend a lot more for less, put it that way.
Have Akai introduced Stems now? I thought it was scheduled for sometime in February in controller mode and coming to standalone sometime in the future, which is pretty vague at best and therefore might even be beaten by NI and others in that regard and might even come back to haunt Akai if they don't bring it to market as soon as their customers expect it. They've had their customers in uproar for a couple of years once before, so it's always a gamble talking about future features that aren't ready.
I suspect NI didn't anticipate the groovebox market rapid growth quickly enough, then the projected sales of the M+ didn't materialize because they rushed it to market before the software was ready, it seemed overpriced and it initially fell short, got bad reviews and NI have perhaps lost momentum due to a sales shortfall, while others were cooking on full steam.
The core Maschine workflow is very slick and hard to beat though and that's something that will probably always be an Achilles heal for the MPC line up imo. MPC's seem to have the bells and whistles, but it comes at a cost of needing to put the time in to get to there, both to understand the workflow, then to follow the workflow, while Maschine feels fast a fluid.
Just my feelings based on how I see things, which may or not have much merit.
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NI introducing standalone stems before Akai? Haha, I'd like to see that, I really would!
🤣
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We're on the same page then as we all want to see that. I'd like all my devices that can make use of stems to have stems. The gauntlet has been thrown.
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I dont think it's necessarily greed, just a ton of bad decisions and and lack of vision, for example: time wasted on sounds.com could have been allocated to Maschine for example. Somehow NI's top dogs did not see the obvious: You can't compete with Splice, especially on a loop store with terrible browsing & curation, regardless of users telling them 100000 times. I remember a complete outrage for sounds.com integration, never seen before, all completely ignored. It's this "we know what we are doing" type of approach, well.. it turned out, they clearly did not.
IMO the people in charge feel like really big endeavors for them like VST3, Apple Silicon support show a commitment that Maschine is not dead, they don't get it that for us that's cool but means nothing in the big picture, it's just compatibility, not improvement.
My prediction based on years of experience is that to fight the overwhelmingly high sentiment that Maschine is dead they will work on some new stuff for 1 or 2 years then it will all die down again to how it is now because some other product will get priority, this has been the endless cycle for NI. Like we got with Clips or Audio some stuff will be released, never tweaked again and then off we go to work on something else, leaving the MAS SW being a collage of unfinished parts. I hope I will be proven wrong tho...
At this point I think they need fresh blood to make decisions, preferably people who actually use the HW/SW, maybe an external consultancy panel of people, or some other big shake-up within their ranks because it feels like they are all completely out of touch... The KK-S MK3 release just proved this point even further IMO, they worked on what they wanted not what the hardcore users were asking.
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That was actually "old blood", recently infused to NI.
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Amen!
Companies are superorganisms. If there is a problem with the company, it’s due to the brain and heart (chief officers and senior VPs) of the superorganism, not the cells and tissues (engineers, customer support, project managers). As a company, the problem with vision, performance, and even the company’s “personality” is always 100% based on its leadership. The company/organization will always behave according to its leadership’s strengths and weakness. Or, as I suspect in NI’s case, it’s narcissism.
So without a change in leadership, nothing is going to change. And what does leadership care about? Revenue and profits! And since these are things that are tracked over short terms, that’s why NI is squarely focused on Kontakt and GR. Nothing else matters to them, because nothing matters to its leadership other than its quarterly financials.
In short, we are screwed. Lol
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