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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/11/2021 in all areas

  1. I don't have these numbers. What I know is that a few years ago, NI noticed that their sales figures were starting to flatten. For a company used to have high two digit growth numbers year after year this is of course a very alarming signal. 😀 They hired some consultants who came to the conclusion that the traditional T&M market NI was operating in simply didn't have left much more air in it to continue to support the growth NI had been getting used to. And strategic decisions were made behind the scene. Not to much of that has been openly communicated yet, but the effects have been quite obvious in the past few years. NI has deprioritized the PC based test and measurement hardware, completely abandoned any motion ambitions, marginalized their vision ambitions and put much of the traditional DAQ hardware into legacy mode. And their whole sales organization has been completely revamped. No field sales offices anymore, highly centralized technical support by typical call center style semi-outsourced places. Behind the scene they do large scale business and have increased their sales further since that alarming consultancy report. So somehow it seems to work. One reason they may not have been very public about these changes is probably that it did change their old model of relying very heavily on external Alliance Members for actual application support of all their customers. In a few strategic industries they now have moved in to deliver full turn key systems themselves directly to the customer. For the typical Alliance Member that probably doesn't directly mean loss of business, since the customers and projects NI serves in this way are accounts that only very few Alliance Members would dare to even consider to look at, as the volume of the business transaction is simply very huge. However it certainly has other effects for all Alliance Members. The contact with NI has been getting very indirect with all the regional sales offices having vanished and the efforts from NI to compensate that with other means haven't gotten much further than marketing presentations with lots of nice talk up to this point. As to LabVIEW: It's demise has been promised since it was first presented. First because it was clearly just a toy that no engineer ever could take seriously, then because NI didn't push for an international standard to formalize the LabVIEW G language, later because they didn't want to open source it. I'm not sure any of these things would have made a significant difference in either the positive or negative direction. It's clear that LabVIEW is nowadays a small division inside NI that may or may not find enough funding by the powers to be, to maintain a steady development. If you look at the software track record of NI it doesn't look to well. They bought many companies and products such as HIQ, Lookout with Georgetown Systems, DasyLab, and quite a few more, and none of them really exists nowaday. Of course a lot of them such as DasyLab were in fact simply buying out competition and it was clear from the start that this product has not a very bright future in the NI stall. Lookout was marketed for quite some time, a lot of its technology integrated into LabVIEW (LabVIEW DSC was directly build on top of much of Lookouts low level technology and the basis for the low level protocols used in Shared Variables and similar things). LabWindows/CVI is lingering a semi-stasis existence for several years already. It's development can't quite keep pace with the main contenders in the market, GCC and Visual Studio. In view of this, acquisitions like Digilent and MCC may look a bit surprising. On the other hand it might be a path to something like a HP/Agilent/Keysight diversification. NI itself moves into the big turn key semiconductor testing business (and EV testing market), one of these other companies takes over the PC based LabVIEW, DAQ, and instrument control business.
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  2. Have you heard that joke about UDP? You might not get it... (But seriously; just subscribing here for the emails out of interest on this topic)
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