What do you think of the new NI logo and marketing push?

[Morteza Vafadar]

I wish it had some color gradient to it. It is too simple.

[Mads]

1 hour ago, Neil Pate said:

I think what we are forgetting is that none of this guff is for us... we are already customers and need no reminding of the benefits of spending your whole instrumentation budget on a cRIO! This stuff is to get the next million customers, the young engineers who might have never heard of National Instruments.

But that is why I do care, because the success of NI is important to us all.  Everyone who has invested in their ecosystem is hurt if NI fails.

[LogMAN]

1 hour ago, Neil Pate said:

The new colour scheme is growing on me, I quite like the green.

It is growing on me too (with exceptions mentioned before). It actually feels refreshing in some sense, which is probably what they intended.

1 hour ago, Neil Pate said:

I think what we are forgetting is that none of this guff is for us... we are already customers and need no reminding of the benefits of spending your whole instrumentation budget on a cRIO! This stuff is to get the next million customers, the young engineers who might have never heard of National Instruments. The slogan is meant to ignite passion in young people, not to excite the already battle hardened. I do think the event was completely overhyped, but this is what marketing is about.

It seems to me that they have totally forgotten about their existing customers. I actually haven't received any invitation, message or notification from NI about any of this (did anyone?). We are the ones that are most excited to use their products now and that doesn't seem to be worth anything. We are also the ones who are passionate about sharing our knowledge and excitement with the next generation of engineers. VIWeek, LAVA, LabVIEW Wiki, OpenG, the Idea Exchange and many more initiatives are prime examples of this. It is very easy for excitement to turn in to frustration if you don't know what is coming next.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong supporter of NI, LabVIEW and anything that comes with it and I sincerely hope that I can continue to do so for the next decades. I'm just frustrated that so many exciting new things are "dumped" in a way that make me feel left out.

[Reds]

Forget about colors and fonts, I want to better understand this quote from Austin Business news:

Shelley Gretlein, NI’s vice president of global marketing, likened its old business model to being a Home Depot where companies can get the materials to build a treehouse. "More and more, customers are moving so fast, they don’t have time to make the treehouse," said Gretlein, a 20-year veteran of the company who spearheaded the internal group that revamped it inside and out. "They don’t have the time, and budgets and teams are shrinking. You need to deliver the whole treehouse."

[Jordan Kuehn]

17 minutes ago, Reds said:

Forget about colors and fonts, I want to better understand this quote from Austin Business news:

NI Systems Engineering

[Dataflow_G]

I don't mind the new green on the landing page of ni.com, but elsewhere on the site the new theme is a bit too much. I wanted to fix the near invisible links that @LogMAN ran into, but got a bit carried away:

If anyone is interested in using the blue style, you can download it from here. Be warned it's not perfect, there's still lots of green bits on mouse over etc, but I find overall it makes the site much more readable.

If blue isn't your thing, the primary color can be changed by setting the root --forrest-green color to something else.

[X___]

And don't think of visiting the site not logged on... You will be granted by this very invasive splash screen, every time.

 

[crossrulz]

And on a mobile, that splash screen takes up more than my screen, making it so I can't even close the dialog.

[Aristos Queue]

23 hours ago, Reds said:

Forget about colors and fonts, I want to better understand this quote from Austin Business news:

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. 

[Neil Pate]

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.

Edited June 19, 2020 by Neil Pate

[Reds]

Thank you AQ. I appreciate these comments. This is important information for so many of us who make our living inside the NI ecosystem. I wish NIC was generally more communicative about their changed view of the world. 

[Aristos Queue]

8 hours ago, Reds said:

I wish NIC was generally more communicative about their changed view of the world. 

NI had a massive online event, the company updated the website, our execs have given interviews, and I-don’t-know-how-many employees are on social media. I’m not sure how much louder we can amplify this. All I did is repeat what has been said in other public forums. 🙂 If I happened to use words that got the point across, great. But the content ain’t new!

[hooovahh]

@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.

[ShaunR]

18 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

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.

That's because it is, to all intents and purposes, an internal restructuring (possibly a political one) and the outward effects aren't tangible or possibly even unknown. 

[Antoine Chalons]

AQ, I fully agree with hooovahh, if the event's point was to convey the message you summed up in a few lines, then I think it failed to be clear - didn't fail to be loud though. (side note : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw)

Maybe we, LAVA people, are just a bunch of nerds who are too focused on technical none-sense to understand anything about corporate strategy. Aren't we obtuse.

Anyway, thank you for cutting through the marketing blur and explaining with direct language.

[Aristos Queue]

Glad I could help. I’ve already seen it have some small external impacts on how NI interacts with customers (in both cases, positively). We will have to wait and see whether it turns into anything more substantive. 

[shoneill]

I think the longer my relationship with NI carries on, the more the message seems to be that I'm not considered part of the direction NI is concentrating on at all.

In a way, the new announcement is a bit like "this isn't designed for you, do you hear us loud and clear?"

[crossrulz]

2 hours ago, shoneill said:

In a way, the new announcement is a bit like "this isn't designed for you, do you hear us loud and clear?"

Mind elaborating on this?

[Mads]

On 6/19/2020 at 12:54 AM, Aristos Queue said:

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. 

The idea that customization is enough seems like a variant of the 80-20 fallacy...🤦‍♂️

To me LabVIEW is the thing that makes NI unique.  It is their greatest product.  It happens to also sell  hardware because of the limitless possibilities introduced by the concept of virtual instrumentation. The RIO concept strengthens that package, and is why most of the hardware we buy from NI are sbRIOs and cRIOs.   Without LabVIEW and RIO we would choose cheaper hardware options. (The hardware ties might unfortunately be one of the things that prevents LabVIEW from becoming all it could and deserves to be though; the graphical champion of all kinds of programming. )

 

[crossrulz]

29 minutes ago, Mads said:

(The hardware ties might unfortunately be one of the things that prevents LabVIEW from becoming all it could and deserves to be though; the graphical champion of all kinds of programming. )

It really depends on your point of view.  I deal with a lot of people who see the hardware integration as the strongest thing about LabVIEW.  But then I run into a bunch of people who just expect LabVIEW to do everything for you, which is just completely unreasonable.  Perhaps that is where FlexLogger, DAQExpress, and the like come into play.

[drjdpowell]

Interesting quote from the ex-NI person posting on Reddit:

Quote

What I would say is NI now seem to be targeting enterprise level business and going for CTOs and high up managers. Convince those that NI is great and all engineers have to use it and that's big dollars.

 

Edited June 23, 2020 by drjdpowell

[Bryan]

52 minutes ago, drjdpowell said:

Interesting quote from the ex-NI person posting on Reddit:

We all know that they wouldn't be the first company to do that and certainly not the last.  It's happened in places I worked before where we were forced to use some obscure, and non-user friendly software applications that were not the industry norm for reasons unknown.  If I were to speculate, it was because someone in the upper echelon had been dazzled or were/knew someone who could financially gain by way of it.  These applications were, as was said, enterprise level agreements/suites/etc. and likely cost the company a lot of money both in purchasing/agreements as well as the time wasted for learning curves and inefficient usage.

Before I joined my current company, "Thou shalt use LabVIEW" was the command from above.  Not all were pleased with the mandate at the time and some still aren't, but it's one of the top reasons that helped me to get a job there.

Edited June 23, 2020 by Bryan

[hooovahh]

Yeah targeting the upper management likely would result in more sales.  But may also result in less engineers willing to use NI and their products, having been force fed the wrong, or less appropriate tool for the job.  I worked with a group that had Veristand 2009 forced down from upper management.  NI came in with a dazzling presentation and convinced them to change over their dyno control systems to it and the PXI platform.  They did without consulting the engineers, and as a result there was a daily battle where I would repeat "Rewrite Veristand" when some trivial task for LabVIEW, couldn't be done in it.  Veristand 2009 ended up being somewhat of a flop, and from what I remember nothing ported to 2010 since NI made some major rewrites of it.  We eventually got an apology from NI which basically equated to, sorry we gave you the impression this product was more usable than it actually was. 

Luckily my current boss knows NI and their offerings, but trusts my opinion over theirs.  They need to convince me something is a good fit, before they will convince him.  They have some new test platforms that directly align with our business (battery test in automotive), and so far I'm unimpressed except when it comes to hardware.

[jacobson]

2 hours ago, hooovahh said:

Luckily my current boss knows NI and their offerings, but trusts my opinion over theirs.  They need to convince me something is a good fit, before they will convince him. 

Ideally this is how it works but I've been surprised at how many higher level technology decisions (usually some standardization effort) are made without any or with little engineering input. I actually wonder if the problem is worse for managers who used to do technical work because they are over confident in their ability to make technical decisions without input from the current engineering team.

[Antoine Chalons]

Funny enough I've seen the opposite situation where an alliance partner company has been using NI HW+LabVIEW for years (rather successfully) and a new CTO was hired to give a new dynamic to the company, but he (the new CTO) thinks NI HW is too expensive and LabVIEW is slow and unstable by nature and definitely not a good tool for any industrial application ; so the lad is slowly but surely pushing his team to use some "real programming language".

I was wondering if anyone has seen similar situations?