March 2024 – a community update from our Chief Product Officer

@Simon_NI please take in serious consideration what expressed by mykejb about providing direct access to previous versions installers (as it was before on NI website).

This would solve many issues.

I’m sure many customers can understand the will of NI to move forward. What is less acceptable is putting obstacles on users simply wanting to use what they already paid for. Many signals lately point to a politic trying to make users being forced to “the new thing”.

If Kontakt (or KK) gets updated and the libraries follow increasing the requirements in order to use them, users not willing to update should be able to easily stay with the products they have and not struggle in order for them to work.

Giving back access to previous versions would allow NI to make the desired steps and simply say “this new version require X and Y to work. If you are not on X and Y, please install that other version”.

No one expects infinite updates for infinite time, but to be able to use what they bought…this is a must, not an expectation.

As I already said in other threads, there are 2 ways to make your users follow with you the path you are paving: the “good” way is to make extraordinary, enticing, innovative products/updates that will make users WANT the new version. The less condivisibile way is to make the products users already have less and less usable.

I’m sure the most prolific way for NI is the one that will make its users excited about what’s coming and not the one making them regretting what they were able to use before…and therefore unsatisfied.

What we see now is instead decisions like already programming the date in which NA1 will be abandoned before NA2 is even a reliable alternative or updating libraries requirements hoping people will buy the requested newer versions of softwares without providing an easy way to keep the own products working. Or even worst…not allowing to install old products with the new NA (the only way left to install and authorize them, since installers and authorizations are not provided anymore, physically nor in a database as the one that was given to us through NI website)

These are things that tend to annoy customers instead of convincing them of the goodness of the “new path”.

Users can understand not being able to use new functionalities with a product they bought years before. What they’ll digest with more difficulty is not being able to use that same product in that same version. Their investment must be assured working. What NI can eventually do is ask if they want to make a new investment in order to have new things. And the user will chose on his own if he is interested

And about the “teams being on the good road with the right priorities”…sometimes asking the final users if this is really the case could be the best way to be sure of it.

NI demonstrating to be sure of itself and thinking to know what’s right is a good thing…but the line between being sure of itself and being too much self confident is sometimes very thin. See the case of the new KK…I’m sure the team acted convinced to take all the right steps…but once confronted with the actual users, things started appearing differently.

Sometimes the infos collected with shared usage data are just…data. Impersonal, not specific, not analyzable. Once again, see the case of KK: some features like deep tagging have been removed because the data said they were used by few. Such a pity those data could not tell you that those few users work was so much useful to so many others, through their NKS for the community.

Maybe an earlier confrontation with the people that will decree the success or failure of a product (the ones that will concretely use it) would have helped. You can make the best red t-shirt in the world, but if when you launch it you discover users wanted green t-shirts…maybe it would have been better to ask them before “what color do you want?”

Please continue with the “new way” of collecting infos (like the threads about the interest users have in what to improve first in Maschine). I know it will end like usually on the internet: very few people will vote for them. But this doesn’t mean that if they don’t vote no one is interested in Maschine. Few people are really participating in forums. But sometimes those few are the voice of many others behind them. Suggestions like D-One ones are not only the fruit of his knowledge of the tool and what he wants to see for it, but also many years of experience reading others’ requests (the ones we hope won’t be ignored anymore)

@Simon_NI

Thankyou for this thread and your post. Also thanks for the confirmation that people will not be forced into subscriptions, which I believe is one of the most controversial areas on many peoples minds. Coming from a person in your postion solidifies it that much more.

Id like to echo @mykejb 's first post.

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Nice to see the comments about Native Access being improved. Really, that's the most important product you have as you can't deliver the other products without it. It needs to be made absolutely rock solid across all platforms, which at the moment it doesn't seem to be. It's a shame the beta program was discontinued because a lot of the current problems would have been spotted before it hit general release.

The other thing I think you need to look at is alternate delivery methods for when things go sideways. Hosting "older" products on Google drive is ok, but it doesn't look that professional when users get "That's been downloaded too much recently, please try later" messages. Ideally NA should allow you to download and install previous versions of products for the case when a newly released product breaks things. Offline installation and authorisation would be nice too for people who don't want their music computers online. I'm very much looking forward to the Komplete Kontrol/Traktor/Maschine updates, hopefully we'll see those in beta very soon?

Unquote

Because of a tiny slipup I made updating, (Im usually fastidious about updating) over the last 3 months I have had the most harrowing, gruelling and frustrating experience Ive ever hit using a computer. Hands down. And that is since the mid 1980s. Google drive is a nightmare. I stopped counting at 12 failed almost complete downloads not counting a raft of error messages like mykejb described. The whole ordeal brought in side issues and extended support going abck and forth with me, which could have all been avoided if I could've gotten a previous installer to downgrade through Native Access.

I also remain on an old version of KK because my ticket from around this time last year still remains open and unresolved. That was regarding KK hardcrashing Logic immediately after I updated KK which basically brought my work to a halt. I had to wait for Jeremy to come online to ask for the previous installer so I could work. May I please suggest, this is so very frustrating when people need the previous installer and they have to go through a lengthy one on one process sometimes waiting weeks by the time support gets things sorted. Id also like to suggest that as NI is a huge worldwide company, people should have access to a more efficient support system.

I realize this thread is not designed to get support requests fulfilled, and thats not my intention in posting here, but rather to give you a working example from one persons experience throughout the last year.

Thankyou for reading.