Software aside, how are people who own the S mk3 series liking or disliking it?

The more things broken at launch, the more that needs to be fixed.

The more that needs to be fixed, the longer it takes.

The answer to this question differs every time.

• In one case, you might need more people on the dev team. I've been on teams where the addition of just one "alpha dog" developer or troubleshooter was all we needed; 2 would have introduced conflicts, and 4 would have created chaos. You might not even need a technician, especially if a person skilled in setting priorities is what the team needs in that moment.
• In another case, you might need more people on the testing team, or you might need to implement more automation for the testing team. Regression testing can take a long time; and might take exponentially longer the more options you are implementing.
• In yet ANOTHER case, you might just need to pick the worst 2 broken things, have the team get started, then take up sword and shield and keep leadership occupied while your team works on those in relative peace and quiet. Ship those 2 things to QA, and get started on the next 2...and so on.

For each of these (and more)...yep; been there and done that!

And the worst thing is when you have a senior manager or VP breathing down your team's neck while they're trying their best to work through code and logic.

As of this writing, KK 3.1.2 has been released to Native Access. This is a good sign that we weren't made to wait until the end of February for it. Maybe the dev team can squeeze another sprint cycle in here in the 2nd half of February.

More frequent updates that address more broken things will, over time, help change customer perception for the better. And that help everybody get back to work sooner.

It all depends on who's making the release decisions. If it's a security guy, he's going to want assurances that it's secure. If she cut her teeth coming up through the art department, it needs to look good! And if he spent 10 years doing QA and unit testing, then he might be more focused on no crashes. Marketing and bean-counting are going to have their own bugaboos that need to be calmed down.

I've worked in some companies where the decision to go live for this or that was from one person; maybe a VP who micromanages too many things. And other companies where it was a panel of people who decided. And yet OTHER companies where nobody really could say they absolutely knew how the approval happened, it just did and now the project has to be done last week!

All we can do now is look forward. And hope that Native Instruments has learned a hard lesson and doesn't let this all happen again in 10 years when they come out with Maschine MK4 or Komplete Kontrol MK4.

That's a great point. But our dear mods here probably can't take something like that upon themselves. It probably needs to come from one or more senior leaders...maybe even from somebody on the VC side of the house.

Personally, if we get on a regular semi-monthly release rhythm and we start to see some repeated wins, I'll be happy to forget my desire to hear an apology. After all, nobody died because of this botched launch, even though maybe some of us have had our life-expectancies shortened by a few hours from the stress, lol! So let's just get it fixed so we can all move on.

I think the months of March, April, and May will be the bellwether for us. Oh, and also Maschine MK4, as well as Komplete 15, when each is released in turn, both need to be smooth. No more gut-twisting surprises, NI! 🤨

I guess it comes down to ones perspective. I understand the importance of time to market for an initial release so I'm okay with getting my hands on the product as early as I can to start working with it knowing the additional features will be coming at no additional cost in the future. In this case the capabilities of the MK3 are so much further advanced than the MK2 I'll get plenty of use out of it right now. That's how I've approached it in the past with things like the Helix and I've gotten a mountain of additional free expanded capabilities over the last 7 years and my wallet has been very happy.

welp.. thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.. but I'd really like to hear what @Matthew_NI has to say on this.

And I'd like to hear something more specific than typical generalities.

Like.. maybe... shifting/commiting development exclusive to the on-device CPU and screen has been a fundamental cause of slow down.

This is not a MIDI controller keyboard in its present form. I would call it “Komplete Kontrol Controller” for now 😜

What a waste of beautiful hardware…

Are you comparing the s88 MK3 with a s88 MK2? I have a MK2 and demoed a MK3 at my local music store and found it to have a very similar action/feel to my MK2. At least close enough not to make me want to purchase it based on that alone. With the release of recent KK updates the mk3 is now at least usable within KK but still not useable outside of Kontakt or KK. For a lot of users that's important.