Open communication - NI guys, feel free to jump in!

It's not my goal to have to do that,I just want a working product, and as far as repeating ourselves, this should show the concern we have for the product. Is that a problem?

 

Maybe an independent forum will help, since they would be unable to delete comments or suspend accounts there. NI recently suspended my support account when I asked how long is a reasonable amount of time to wait for a bug fix. This after closing and deleting my outstanding tickets regarding the same unresolved issue. Clearly once they have your money, they don’t feel like they owe you an operational product, and find it within their rights to leave issues unresolved and delete or suspend your access to their support channel despite acknowledging defects in their programming and leaving the issue unresolved with no ETA for a solution.

Good luck to you all in getting new features addressed. We can’t even get bugs fixed, never mind the MCU transport back, and now this “black keys” edition... talk about misappropriation of resources...

 

Maybe because there is no progress.

 

First, you claimed I said something I clearly didn't, now your saying I implied complaining is a problem? I am a complainer... Why would it be a problem? It feels like we aren't speaking the same language here.

 

Right on, my battle's not with you. Native Instruments, just needs to fix these issues.

 

Oh that must be @%*&$$ annoying :/ Did it come up suddenly or you bought it with this?

 

Exactly, if you don't deliver you just tell, hence this topic. They keep saying that the change in communication requires more time - for whatever it requires to do - but it costs nothing to come here or open a Sticky Thread and let the customers know that it is still happening just we have no detail to tell yet...Or we have done this so far and working on this...How hard is that?
Yep and agree with the disrespectful aspect towards the CUSTOMERs...

 

What's amazing is,a couple years ago Native Instruments was granted 59 million dollars from EMH Partners as an investment,they saw some potential obviously,but just think about that for just a second!
Now think about all the other smaller companies and developers who strive to make sure their software is bug free and just works as advertised, who work endless hours for peanuts compared to NI.

Is it really so much to ask that NI pay a tiny portion to a talented developer on their team to correct the major flaws and issues with KK software?
Native Instruments reps, what gives?

 

I think good to keep cool and calm. Good to keep in mind that this place probably represents a tiny minuscule portion of NI total customer base using NI products regularly. Also, NI is a corporation that make products that are commercial off the shelf software, not some FOSS project where you can interact with developers directly*. The onus is on NI to make their own decisions on how and where to allocate resources for which product portfolio. For all you know, you and your technical problems and request represents 0.0001% of their customer requests. Demanding one on one service is a little bit unrealistic IMO.

* Even on a FOSS project. you better do your homework and better know what you are talking about before you start posting on their developer mailing lists because those peeps will just ignore you.

 

Thats horrible...I bought it with this, the first time i opened up mixer mode it was there. And the issue is known from NI side, they hope to solve it via Firmware update. Otherwise whats more to be likely there is a huge failure rate from the supplier, and that there seems like no quality insurance team who makesa final check if the product os working...Ups NI.

Does anyone know who the investor behind NI is? I will write them...they should start reading the forum...

 

EMH Partners

http://cdm.link/2017/10/native-instruments-got-huge-chunk-investment-grow/

 

Yeah, I agree as I said before and to answer your question, IDK but I suspect its related to some internal restructuring that has been happening for a while, important people left and new ones joined in, a new target audience has been clearly defined, especially since the external investment that trusampler just mentioned.
Maybe they're trying to get their *ish* together before attempting to communicate/deliver certain things, maybe they have no intention to change at all.

PO's have attempted to communicate before in the Maschine forum for example and it seriously backfired once the plans internally changed, that made a permanent "promise not delivered" stain, it actually encouraged people to buy specific products based on the roadmap presented at the time that was never fulfilled. So to me, it definitively was worst than silence because it created expectations people didn't even have before.
To anyone reading what I am saying please use logic and common sense and dont confuse this statement with me defending NI or their silence but a lot of posts here seem overly naive.

I never worked in a 500+ employee company like NI to even begin to understand who makes this sort of decision, my GF works in a 1.4 billion dollar company (3000+ employees) and you wouldn't believe how complicated the ranks are, even when you're hi ranked convincing who really matters to make a change can be quite challenging. Look at how many times (this thread and others) Matt had to explain he is 'just a support tech' and has no power to change anything other than passing on the forums sentiments, he's is kind of attacked like he is a CEO when he obviously isn't even close to that.

Putting myself in their shoes, if I was a Product Owner/Manager I would be scared to death to speak publicly tbh, because if plans change because of a higher ranked person or stakeholders the one who delivered the message will be seen as accountable not matter how good his intentions might have been. Again, I am not defending their behavior, just putting things into perspective.

 

I can agree with your statement about company size and so on. I work in a company in the payment industry. We were 1500 people and just bought by a company 10000+ people. And things got even more complicated to change. These kind of structures you can only change via high level strategic values, clear top management decision, big projects, and a focus on the customer to breakdown into the teams where theycan legitimate such needs we have.

I think its nothing wrong to want to make money. Especially when you have established products and a eco system to work with and let this grow with digitalisation, new cloud services and so on snd bring that into the products. BUT: There is one single but, anyway you dont should stop work on the base of your product. You should listen to your customer and to your devolopers. You should give them the power to do that that they can do maintenace in their products where they see what the products need.

I think Native Instruments stopped listen to the customer and that is clearly an issue together with only implement new money making features like inplementing sounds.com and so on.
Steve jobs once said that people dont know what products they want. I would agree for new innovative products because the broadwide world does not see where the oppurtunities are. But for existing products like this: we clearly know what kind of improvement we want in workflow, functions and so on. And at the moment we are even a level lower when NI starts to ship defect products like maschine mk3 and komplete kontrol mk2 with flickering screens. Thats hard to undetstand.

 

Fangen wir an Ihnen zu schreiben. Die Unternehmung gehört zu einem Teil ihnen. Wenn Sie ihr Investment gesichert sehen wollen und kurz wie mittelfristig value schaffen, dann sollten sie auf uns hören...

 

So, as a Komplete (sic) outsider to the NI company, my impression is they are focusing more on some products of theirs that I don't use, such as the Tracktor stuff and the Komplete Ultimate Collection stuff. You can kind of tell by the order in which their product portfolio appears on their web site.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/

I originally got into the NI ecosystem based on Maschine, which I don't regret one bit. I am (was?) an old school music hobbyist guy from the tape machine days and a product like Maschine totally redefined how i thought about things when making music and what and how I went about doing it. I used to think stuff like Maschine was just for DJ's that do weddings and I was too cool and alternative to use such a lamo thing.. boy, was I so wrong. I don't regret it one bit. I also really liked the Guitar Rig product and its really cool. My investment in NI products I feel I have gotten more than my moneys worth out of it.

That being said, I does seem Maschine and Guitar Rig are not as much of a priority for the company and I am actively researching other possible alternatives from other vendors.

The size of the company really has very little to do with it. Its more corporate communications strategy. NI are a corporation that makes commercial products and that's that. They are will within their rights to dictate and manage their communications strategy any way they see fit and make it align with how they are structured as a company. End users having direct access to their developers and employees is sort of a silly expectation. No corporation is obliged to do that and no one would ever get any work done if they spent all their time chatting with customers.

Sure, a smaller company like Uhe will have the owner of the company communicate directly with customers and thats because it's a very effective and cost effective way to handle and manage customer communication (he doesn't have to hire lots of marketing staff) and make them feel they are listened to (and yes, it does actually generate sales) but it's unrealistic to expect a much larger company like NI with many more products to sell to do the same thing.

just my 2 cents and ramble for the day.

 

I guess you misunderstood the posts before yours. Listen to your customer doesnt mean usually that the CEO needs to chat with the customer. But there are a lot of good examples where the CEO is very close to their employes. Ingvard Kamprad former CEO and founder of IKEA was very close to their employe. So why you do that? Because when you listen to your internal base (employe) you will get as well what the customer focus should be and when to change something. Only a happy customer is a recurring customer. In the company i work the CEO offers to chat with him occasionaly and he wants to hear the storys from the base. As well customer ones.

In terms of communication i would not expect to communicate roadmaps and so on from NI. It doesnt make sense from my point. It would be even better not to do it but therefore to deliver what customer are asking for.

 

I've seen alot of giants fall with this sort of mentality. We're bigger and better and can't lose ,eventually get's you knocked out of business most times.The whole we can't lose regardless how we treat are customers is a fact of the matter with alot of corporations ,but I love to see the ultimate revenge of payback.Think Avid for example and how much they lost by NOT listening to their consumer base, now they're trying to re brand a company which was once on top.
Doing the right thing is somehow looked at as wrong here, ironic. Ultimately I think everyone here,just wants the products to work as advertised. Native Instruments made bold face lies with the MK2, let's not act like we forgot the main reason we're even posting here please!

By the way, who here was even around for the NI Kore nightmare? Do the history on the product,and the development of it, and then you'll understand the distrust for Native Instruments.

Alot of us spend alot of coin building our eco systems around these lies and advertising claims,and when they don't come through with their claims, we have all the right in the world to complain,and warn other users what's going on!!!

 

Fwiw. I don't build my setup based on promised features. I invest based on products that are released and have been around a while and work well. The NI products I use work well. They lack a few features other vendors have . It would be nice if NI implement ed some of those. But if not , I guess one has.to look at other solutions and accept that there is no.confidence in the old products.

 

Understandable, I on the other hand do build my eco system around the products that claim to do what they say they will for example : Komplete Kontrol MK2 was marketed to "control your daw" ,but in the 2nd revision Native Instruments mysteriously just pulled transport controls MCU / to control my daw. I was unaware as a customer,as they did not advertise this.

So now I'm stuck waiting on them to add the feature that was already in the 1st gen product I upgraded from. Who's fault is this? Is it mine,since I couldn't read their minds? Wrong is wrong,and NI are wrong for this!

Sadly there's a ton of us in here awaiting this fix. Completely unacceptable,but I've invested alot and can't just turn around and buy all new equipment.

 

reporting bug -> acknowledged as a bug -> asking about ETA for fix -> "can't comment" speech -> complaining -> no answer at all ->waiting 6 months -> chasing -> saying it's fixed (not in release note) -> not working -> reporting back -> nothing -> creating new call to complain -> saying sorry and being escalated -> waiting 3 days -> nothing...

THEF************CK???????????????????