[enfield]

Originally Posted by MBTC

A company that stops innovating is pretty much doomed. I've worked in countless technology organizations that exhibit the same outwardly visibile symptoms Access is displaying today, and I could write a book on what leads to the decline of a tech industry leader. I of course have no insight on what is really going on with Access right now or if they are really on the decline, but I do know that I've always been fascinated at how synth manufacturers never seem to be able to uphold their mojo.

For example, why is it that today we cannot buy something like a JP-8000 on steroids? Instead, Roland comes out with some piece of crap synth and slaps the Jupiter name on it, almost mocking one of the greatest synths every created. I would be impressed with Roland if they still made the original JP-8000 for example. Yet, nobody ever does that. As soon as they have a great product, you can rest assured it will find a place in a museum somewhere but that not only will that product not evolve into better offspring of same, that they won't even be able to sustain same!

In technology and engineering in general, I have watched so many companies take a product about 90% of the way to perfection, then abandon the last ten percent because the last 10 percent is the hardest to pull off. Or in some cases, upper management says "well, we've got the product we want now, we just have to sell it harder" so they start laying off the engineers that know how the product works and start filling their seats with more salesmen. Problem is, that last 10 percent of bug fixes was never worked out, and the collateral damage from such catasrophic management decisions is too great, the aftershock lingers, the product goes in the museum of technology history of great things that might have been.

I hate to seem down on the Virus but I was really looking forward to what they might announce. I know there is that .0001% they can make a liar out of me and introduce something outside the NAMM window, maybe later this year, but I get the feeling there was a bunch of folks that got tired of standing on a sinking ship and have moved on. Maybe they perceived the soft synth movement to be unstoppable, so what is the point of working on Total Integration and Virus Control and getting them actually working?

+1
Not only going after the money and releasing a 'master of nothing jack of all trades' palette of unfinished products is disgusting and disappointing, but abandoning them as well... mainly support-wise.

The situation now with Access is not that serious at all, I'm just simply disappointed because I've been waiting for months for something big from them in vain