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@Aristos Queue, I was part of the private preview event and afterwards there were several comments basically saying "I watched all of this and have no idea what NI is announcing". And multiple requests that NI make it clear what they are trying to announce. I thought maybe the public event would be more clear. Nope, dozens of comments were flying in asking what, if anything was changing as the event went on. After the event ended my favorite comment was "That was a great introduction, but when does the actual event start?". Threads on Reddit, LAVA, and NI all have had various amounts of "What does this mean?" other than a new logo and color scheme. After reading and listening to NI's feedback, only your post made it clear to me what NI was trying to say. So while NI marketing may think they are making it loud and clear, the community has also been pretty loud themselves with their statements that they aren't sure what NI was trying to say.

The core of our business has changed. Fewer users are developing their own test applications; instead, they're buying something off the shelf like TestStand. Fewer users are developing their own data acquisition software; instead, they're buying something off the shelf like FlexLogger. This trend alters significantly the role of LabVIEW (CG and NXG) in the NI ecosystem -- it becomes far less important to support whole application development (though, of course, we still do and will) and far more important to support "just a bit of customization" when the pre-built tools fail. A lot of software has an endless array of switches and options, but LV provides the ability for a user to write a custom routine to specify the behavior they want in some corner niche of a product. Think like Signal Express, able to generate sine wave, square wave, triangle wave or "pick a VI that generates the wave that you need" wave. What's funny about this is that although the app devs are growing rarer, they're also individually growing more profitable for NI as a whole because the companies still paying to develop custom software are the ones that are generally buying a lot of hardware to do something unique in the world (or not in the world, in the case of SpaceX, Blue Origin, Ad Astra, etc.). So I don't expect the big scale parts of LabVIEW to vanish, but I do expect them to be driven by specific requests from megascale customers rather than from the massed collective. The massed collective will be driving more of the IDE developments. At least, that's my suspicion at this time based on the presentations I've seen.

I discussed with @Mark Balla and we figured out a way to get all the old videos that used to be on the Tecnova site up to Youtube. It will take a few days but this is in progress. Probably within a week all the videos should be up. I will update this thread with progress.

Thanks AQ, you are the first to actually spell this out in words that make sense to engineers. Not sure too many here are going to like it though! ps: I liked your post due to its honesty and absence of marketing weasel words, not because I think this is a particularly good strategy for NI. Maybe I have just had a weird career but in the 20 years or so I have been developing LabVIEW based solutions virtually never would a custom off-the-shelf piece of software like Signal Express or similar come anywhere close to doing what I needed it to and it would require so much customisation that the benefit would be so low. To me LabVIEW is a programming language or RAD tool and the responsibility of NI is to deliver first class hardware with amazing software to help me bring the two together and that is it.