I read with amusement (bemusement?) the recent go-round over on CDM wherein Mr. Kirn aired some grievances from users regarding the state of Digidesign and M-Audio drivers viz. Leopard and Vista. The VP of Lollipop Land... errr... I mean "Head Of Customer Support And Services" of Digidesign and the General Manager of M-Audio both responded at length to missives that Mr. Kirn put up. *snort* The responses remind me of the old joke: Child to sister: "You're stupid." Parent: "That's not polite. Apologize to your sister right now!" Child to sister: "I'm sorry that you're stupid." Obviously I have an extremely biased opinion, and am eminently unqualified to make comments regarding that company's business practices, but naturally I won't let that stop me from shooting my mouth off. When you aggressively seek market share and it gets away from you, and people eventually complain about it getting away from you, blaming the results on the OS vendor (which, long story short, is exactly what occurred in both the responses) is a fairly silly thing to do. I'm sure many long-time readers will say "yeah, but Chris, I seem to recall you bashing on Apple fairly frequently." 'Tis true, I've been known to maybe drop a hint that the Emperor was in his skivvies now and again, and that's doubly amusing in the music industry, where apparently the OS you choose to use defines your entire existence, and must be defended with your life. But that's just venting. When Apple throws us a loop, we cowboy up and fix whatever it is they broke, or we broke, or whatever. We certainly don't let 19 months go by. There isn't a piece of hardware made, by anybody ever, that has software so complicated that a multi-million-dollar corporation can't manage to make new firmware in 19 months, unless that corporation is lazy or just doesn't give a shit, or both. I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. Bullshit! That aside, they're in a fairly uncomfortable situation right now, and while that is bad for the consumers that are directly invested in the two companies, I think it is a good thing for the computer music industry as a whole, as it allows other smaller companies an opportunity to take advantage of the situation, should they see fit. This, in turn, benefits all of us by resulting in (theoretically) higher quality and (theoretically) lower prices. Capitalism in action. I've been pondering how business in this day and age works, and it seems to me that small agile companies (I'll use Apogee as an example) are far better at serving the needs of their customers than big bloated piles of shitsauce (let's go ahead and use Digidesign for the shitsauce.) I'm sure that the guys at Apogee would love to have the resources of Digidesign, but the fact that they have a specialty market and don't really work outside that market much kind of keeps them small and agile. While the Apogee products carry a premium price, they are far longer-lived and higher quality than the products their competitors at Digi and M-Audio make, and are thus technically cheaper when you get down to it. To use one single product as an example, the Trak 2 was released in late 2000, just shy of eight years ago. It is still sold today, and if you bought one of the first Trak 2s (I have a close friend that did exactly that) you have a product that works almost exactly the same as it did in 2000, except better. If you bought an M-Audio inter... oh, wait... they were called MIDIman then, weren't they? Did they make audio inter... oh... Okay, if you bought a Digide... oh, wait. You bought the Apogee convertor because the Digidesign one wasn't very good, didn't you? And you use ProTools why, again? Because it is stable? Well, that is demonstrably untrue. Because the DSP farm in an HD system takes the load off your CPU? Yeah, that eight-core Mac Pro really needs a lot of help. It can barely do anything. Because it sounds so god-damn good? Spare me. Bits are fucking bits whether they're shit out of Logic, ProTools, Cubase, or Sonar. Next thing you'll be telling me that it has a "wider soundstage and greater depth." Yeah, and I've got a nice wooden volume knob I want to sell you. Long story short, while it fucking sucks for the people that are having a hard time with M-Audio and Digi shit (and I'll take this brief opportunity to get a tiny "I told you so" in, just because I can) in the long run you'll be better off. Either that company will have learned its lesson after getting slapped around by the clue fairy, or it won't, and will go out of business. Either way, the consumer is well served. What annoys me is that everyone is patting them on the back for actually coming out and "apologizing." We're in a sad, sad state of affairs when people are generally shocked that someone should own up to their mistakes.

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