NI recognizes LabHSM as SDK competitor

[hviewlabs]

This is official now: NI acknowledged LabHSM is a competition for its State Diagram Kit and refused to put even a couple of lines about LabHSM in its NI News email bulletin. It's not a speculation - we were explicitly told that competition with SDK WAS THE reason. This is despite they did publish information about third party products in NI News before!

It's a great honor for a small company like H View Labs to be recognized as a competitor by NI itself. However, we were never going to compete with NI. We love NI and LabVIEW and strongly beleive that LabHSM would actually promote the use of LabVIEW itself by making the life of the LabVIEW Developers easier and, hence, increase LabVIEW and related products sales! Well, unfortunately, NI doesn't seem to share this view. This position obviously doesn't match their claims about supporting efforts of the third party developers and we think the community must know about this.

About LabHSM: LabHSM is a professionally designed toolkit that allows creating complex event-driven LabVIEW application as an easily maintainable collection of asynchronously communicating active objects ( actors ) based on a universal Hierarchical State Machine ( HSM or statechart ) template. The LabHSM toolkit enables the programmer to work on a higher level of abstraction and utilize agile software development methodologies combining design and coding in one highly flexible process.

Please see http://www.labhsm.com for details and a FREE UNLIMITED PERIOD TRIAL download.

Stanislav Rumega

NI Certified LabVIEW Developer

H VIew Labs

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Hmm, I don't think NI has to do anything. I see no reason why you think that you have the right to any free publicity from NI. I think they have the right to refuse the publication of any product that they feel might impact their own homegrown products. As far as I can tell from your website, you are not an Alliance member company so i can't see any leverage you may have in that regard. Actually, as an Alliance member myself, I would be very upset to find out that you have received special treatment.

So, in my opinion, (unless they have attacked you legally) NI has done nothing wrong here. You have many venues in which to promote your products and I noticed you have posted announcements both here in the LAVA forums, on the NI Discussion Forums and many other newsgroups and sites. Also, there is a 4-line announcement of your tool on the NI Devzone frontpage.

[Mike Ashe]

If NI tried to do something to prevent you from selling your product, or told you that it was not "authorized" per the license agreement because it competes with their toolkit, then I think that you would have a legitimate beef. But it is somewhat foolish to expect them to advertise your competing product in their newsletter. Market it as best you can and if it gains a niche, great. If not try to improve either it or your marketing, but don't focus on what NI does or might do or not do. I made that mistake for too long myself.

You might want to try to write an article explaining hierarchical state machines and use your product as an example, then submit to one of the trade magazines such as Test & Measurement. Good luck.

[hviewlabs]

Sorry for a late add-on, but somehow I didn't get the notifications about replies and discovered them only recently.

It was not the very fact they refused to mention LabHSM in NI News - they are under now obligation to do that, of course. It was HOW it was done, that really insulted me. Instead of just telling me straight in the face that they wouldn't do that because they consider LabHSM a competitor for SDK, they (NI News people at least) decided to ignore me whatsoever: for WEEKS not returning my calls and not replying to my emails (with my offers of cooperation and even profit sharing, by the way)! Do you consider this to be an appropriate behavior for a company claiming it encourages third-party development efforts which would help to use LabVIEW in a wider range of applications? Or do you think appearing of LabHSM is not an important event enough for the LabVIEW community?

Well, there are about 3000 people working at NI and no, not all of them are that inpolite. I finally got a hold of Mr. J.R. Allen, LabVIEW marketing manager, who runs LabVIEW Zone. Only from him, not from the NI News people(!), I finally learned why they behaved like that. I deeply appreciate the efforts of Mr. J.R. Allen in helping to spread the word about LabHSM by placing a link to it on the front page of LabVIEW zone for a while. I express my appreciation (to him, not to NI as a company). However, Mr. J.R. Allen works for NI and apparently was told by his superiors at some moment to

ignore me and existence of LabHSM too. In his recent presentation (http://www.ni.com/swf/presentation/us/vi_performance/) he talks about architecture and state machines (pushes SDK there, of course) but doesn't even mention the very existence of LabHSM, not even in the links section! I

sent him an email asking to do at least that (mention LabHSM on the links page), but he never replied. Well, that's corporate ethics for you!

Of course, compared to the anti-competitive licensing issues this incident is minor but it kind of confirms an unfortunate direction in which NI is heading in how they treat anybody they consider competition. I didn't even intend to become a competitor, by the way, - just wanted to share my technique and maybe make some money for myself AND for NI from making their flagship product, LabVIEW even more powerful. Unfortunately, they just seem fixated on the fact that LabHSM is more powerful than SDK and worry about SDK only.

Stanislav