NI's New Software Subscription Model

[hooovahh]

Love it, also we do have a meme thread on LAVA, that is way under used.

[JB_1592]

On 3/3/2022 at 7:11 AM, ShaunR said:

I'm not sure that was meant to be "Subscription model and related questions" but oh my god. After watching the full video I can safely say I would have walked out within the first 10 minutes. Not only was it not what was advertised but it was one big poll in a totally inappropriate format of "live".

 

Yikes... I've never gone to one of these conferences. Is the privilege of sitting in a terrible focus group for an hour what people buy tickets for?! 😲

Anyone else find it hilarious that "you're talking about a different file format, it's really hard for us to do" was his explanation of what would stand in the way of... A different file format. 🤣

(And is it just me, or are most of his responses to questions/concerns just complete nonsense? Either completely misunderstanding the question, or not relevant at all. Does he really believe that anyone commenting that the way NXG implemented a feature wasn't ideal is concerned about whether they will literally just copy over the source code?)

[hooovahh]

16 hours ago, JB_1592 said:

Yikes... I've never gone to one of these conferences. Is the privilege of sitting in a terrible focus group for an hour what people buy tickets for?! 😲

Not necessarily but I see what you mean. The conference usually has several presentations happening at one, in different rooms and you pick the one you want to go to knowing you can't see them all.  At NI Week the popular presentations would be presented more than once, but most were presented once with slides available afterwards, and in some cases a recording.  I haven't attended a GDev Con so I don't know if they differ from this. 

You pick the presentation you want to go to based on the one sentence summary, and whom is presenting.  I have walked out of more than one presentation that looked like it would be one thing, but wasn't.  I assume a presentation by a prominent NI employee, on the subject of LabVIEW future made it a popular session.

[X___]

You will love this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/NI-s-move-to-subscription-software/td-p/4215663

In essence: we failed you, but this is because you were not paying us enough, so we will change this, which will be good value for you and us.

What was he saying about denying reality?

[LogMAN]

9 hours ago, X___ said:

You will love this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/NI-s-move-to-subscription-software/td-p/4215663

In essence: we failed you, but this is because you were not paying us enough, so we will change this, which will be good value for you and us.

What was he saying about denying reality?

I suspect they did another one of their "approaches" and hired more consultants to completely miss the point...

This is really sad and I fail to see how any of this makes LabVIEW a better product and not just more expensive to their current user base.

Responses like this are also a good reason to seek alternatives. NI has made it clear for quite some time that LabVIEW is only an afterthought to their vision. Instead they are building new products to replace the need for LabVIEW ("it's not the only tool"). Customers will eventually use those products over writing their own solutions in LabVIEW, which means more business for NI and a weak argument for LabVIEW.

In my opinion, higher prices are also a result of balancing cross-subsidization. In the past, other products likely added to the funds for LabVIEW development in order to drive business. With more and more products replacing the need for LabVIEW, these funds are no longer available. Eventually, when there are not enough customers to fund development, they will pull the plug and sunset the product.

On the bright side, they might gain a large enough user base to invest in the long-term development of LabVIEW. They might listen to the needs of their users and improve its strengths and get rid if its weaknesses. They might make it a product that many engineers are looking forward to use and who can't await the next major release to engineer ambitiously

I hope for the latter and prepare for the former.

[ShaunR]

12 hours ago, X___ said:

You will love this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/NI-s-move-to-subscription-software/td-p/4215663

In essence: we failed you, but this is because you were not paying us enough, so we will change this, which will be good value for you and us.

What was he saying about denying reality?

It's not directed at us (engineers). It's a sales pitch to internal profit centers with the hope that external LabVIEW engineers will use the arguments to their upper management.

In essence it is "this is good for both of us, but mainly us, and means we will listen more, maybe". You will notice there are no concrete or tangible benefits to anyone other than  NI.

However I don't think this brain-wave coming directly after NXG being killed is coincidence. What is clear is that their mind is made up and now it's just a case of managing the PR.

"The beatings will continue until morale improves" - Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty

[X___]

I have no idea why the name Boeing seems to be colliding with that of NI in my mind lately...

[Stagg54]

On 3/7/2022 at 5:31 PM, JB_1592 said:

 

Yikes... I've never gone to one of these conferences. Is the privilege of sitting in a terrible focus group for an hour what people buy tickets for?! 😲

Anyone else find it hilarious that "you're talking about a different file format, it's really hard for us to do" was his explanation of what would stand in the way of... A different file format. 🤣

(And is it just me, or are most of his responses to questions/concerns just complete nonsense? Either completely misunderstanding the question, or not relevant at all. Does he really believe that anyone commenting that the way NXG implemented a feature wasn't ideal is concerned about whether they will literally just copy over the source code?)

If you don't like the presentation selection, you are welcome to submit your own ideas for this year. Deadline is April 30th so you have plenty of time.
https://gdevconna.org/present/

[Stagg54]

On 3/8/2022 at 9:57 AM, hooovahh said:

Not necessarily but I see what you mean. The conference usually has several presentations happening at one, in different rooms and you pick the one you want to go to knowing you can't see them all.  At NI Week the popular presentations would be presented more than once, but most were presented once with slides available afterwards, and in some cases a recording.  I haven't attended a GDev Con so I don't know if they differ from this. 

You pick the presentation you want to go to based on the one sentence summary, and whom is presenting.  I have walked out of more than one presentation that looked like it would be one thing, but wasn't.  I assume a presentation by a prominent NI employee, on the subject of LabVIEW future made it a popular session.

We only had 1 track. Maybe in the future we'll graduate to 2 or more. 

As far as Eric's presentation, a. we didn't have a whole lot to chose from (being our first year and generally a smaller conference due to COVID) and b. as you mentioned a prominent NI employee talking on the future of LabVIEW seemed an interesting proposition. We knew the general topic of his presentation but didn't know exactly how it was going to go. 

Having been there, I haven't watched the video, so I don't know how it comes off in the video, but I thought it was an alright session in person. Looking back on it with all the things that have happened since then, I can see why you might look on it with a negative light. For all the talk of listening to their customers more, they don't seem to be heeding that advice.
 

[jcarmody]

This is pertinent to the discussion on Unicode, but more related to the meme - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

[X___]

On 3/9/2022 at 7:24 PM, Stagg54 said:

We only had 1 track. Maybe in the future we'll graduate to 2 or more. 

As far as Eric's presentation, a. we didn't have a whole lot to chose from (being our first year and generally a smaller conference due to COVID) and b. as you mentioned a prominent NI employee talking on the future of LabVIEW seemed an interesting proposition. We knew the general topic of his presentation but didn't know exactly how it was going to go. 

Having been there, I haven't watched the video, so I don't know how it comes off in the video, but I thought it was an alright session in person. Looking back on it with all the things that have happened since then, I can see why you might look on it with a negative light. For all the talk of listening to their customers more, they don't seem to be heeding that advice.
 

The problem with that talk is that it says nothing about what the stated goals of NXG were, why the progresses were so slow, what their roadmap looked like at the time they canned it, and what their plans are for the future. Instead, there was a mention of their audit by a bunch of Agile zealots, a free advertisement for online post-it boards and other kind of nonsense about why the lessons they learned (essentially regurgitated slogans) should be taken very seriously by the audience (no kidding). And then there was the now infamous series of botched polls and Q & As which of course they have diligently ignored ever since.

Not that it departs much from what the scripted presentations at NI week used to be (at least the few I watched online) so it shouldn't have been a surprise that it would end up that way.

I am ahoping that those really interested in actual facts managed to ask him those questions later on (if so, please tell us). In my world (academia), the most important bits are gathered that way, by post=presentation discussions. If your format doesn't constrain presenters to be around during the whole series and be available for discussions, this calls for changes.

This being said, thanks for posting those presentations!

[ShaunR]

3 hours ago, jcarmody said:

This is pertinent to the discussion on Unicode, but more related to the meme - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

Just to side-track the whinging completely (most of it mine  ) and to show that it's not as hard as NI make it out to be; this will get you about 80% of the way with UTF8 (UTF8 FTW) on English Windows systems.

Note that the Windows ANSI functions - the underlying calls for the LabVIEW primitives - do notionally support UTF8. Rolf can give a much better explanation of why this works (Codepages) and the pitfalls of using it.

There is no change to the VI, by the way. It is just changing the setting and restarting the OS.

 

utf8.zip

 

Edited March 11, 2022 by ShaunR

[X___]

On 3/11/2022 at 10:55 AM, ShaunR said:

Just to side-track the whinging completely (most of it mine  ) and to show that it's not as hard as NI make it out to be; this will get you about 80% of the way with UTF8 (UTF8 FTW) on English Windows systems.

Note that the Windows ANSI functions - the underlying calls for the LabVIEW primitives - do notionally support UTF8. Rolf can give a much better explanation of why this works (Codepages) and the pitfalls of using it.

There is no change to the VI, by the way. It is just changing the setting and restarting the OS.

I found clever to try out that setting, only to realize the hard way that it was messing with the RTF .NET support. Namely, saving a .NET rich text box content to rtf generated a file with header starting with {\urtf1\ansi... instead of {\rtf1\ansi..., which prevented reloading the file in the rich text box.

(similar to this error report: https://supportcenter.devexpress.com/ticket/details/t993371/import-from-rtf-richeditcontrol-does-not-correctly-display-specific-characters-when-the)

Not only that but Word would not open that file as rtf, but as plain text (which made it fairly easy for me to spot the culprit).

Buyer beware.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

There is a reason that it is still marked Beta (and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future). It is a telltale sign that even the RichTextEdit control, which is a Microsoft technology has problems with that setting.

Basically enabling UTF8 as a codepage feature would be a nice idea, IF all Windows applications were properly prepared to work with codepages that can be more than 1 byte per character. But since this simple assumption of 1 byte == 1 character works for all English speaking countries, there have been many sins committed in this respect and nobody ever noticed. Enabling this feature tries to solve something that can not really be solved since there is simply to much cruft out there that will fail with it (and yes LabVIEW has also areas where it will stumble over this).

Linux is in that respect a bit better of. The Linux developers never were shy about simply abandoning something and put people up with facts and tell them, this is how we will do it from now on. Take it or leave it but don't complain if it doesn't work for you in the future if you do not want to follow the new standard. Most desktop distributions nowadays simply use UTF8 as standard locale throughout, pretty much what this setting would do under Windows. And distributions simply removed applications that could not deal with it properly.

Edited March 14, 2022 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[X___]

4 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

There is a reason that it is still marked Beta (and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future). It is a telltale sign that even the RichTextEdit control, which is a Microsoft technology has problems with that setting.

Basically enabling UTF8 as a codepage feature would be a nice idea, IF all Windows applications were properly prepared to work with codepages that can be more than 1 byte per character. But since this simple assumption of 1 byte == 1 character works for all English speaking countries, there have been many sins committed in this respect and nobody ever noticed. Enabling this feature tries to solve something that can not really be solved since there is simply to much cruft out there that will fail with it (and yes LabVIEW has also areas where it will stumble over this).

Linux is in that respect a bit better of. The Linux developers never were shy about simply abandoning something and put people up with facts and tell them, this is how we will do it from now on. Take it or leave it but don't complain if it doesn't work for you in the future if you do not want to follow the new standard. Most desktop distributions nowadays simply use UTF8 as standard locale throughout, pretty much what this setting would do under Windows. And distributions simply removed applications that could not deal with it properly.

The fix, BTW, was quite simple: delete the offending "u" character in the header (using Notepad ++ or any neutral editor). This fixed the problem with Word or the .NET rtf loading method.

In the meantime, I have switched off the Windows beta function.

[ShaunR]

18 hours ago, X___ said:

it was messing with the RTF .NET

You'll get no sympathy from me  There is a reason (actually a plethora of reasons) .NET is banned form my projects 

The RTF bug is in the save function. You can either save it as UnicodePlainText (lose all the snazzy rendering stuff like images) or get the RTF string and save it with LV file primitives. But your problems are only just starting with the RichTextBox. Like I said. It will get you 80% of the way there.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

19 minutes ago, ShaunR said:

You'll get no sympathy from me  There is a reason (actually a plethora of reasons) .NET is banned form my projects 

The RTF bug is in the save function. You can either save it as UnicodePlainText (lose all the snazzy rendering stuff like images) or get the RTF string and save it with LV file primitives. But your problems are only just starting with the RichTextBox. Like I said. It will get you 80% of the way there.

I'm pretty sure the .NET RTF control is not much more than a fairly simple wrapper around the actual RichTextEdit Control which is pretty much a Windows Common Control component. Pretty much everything of the business logic is in the according Windows DLL and the API is exposed as macros around the Windows messages that you send to the control.

[X___]

4 hours ago, ShaunR said:

The RTF bug is in the save function. You can either save it as UnicodePlainText (lose all the snazzy rendering stuff like images) or get the RTF string and save it with LV file primitives. But your problems are only just starting with the RichTextBox. Like I said. It will get you 80% of the way there.

Mixing text and graphics, as well as allowing style and color, undo and redo, etc. is precisely why I am using the RTB .NET object. Care to enlighten me how you can do that otherwise in LV?

[ShaunR]

3 hours ago, X___ said:

Mixing text and graphics, as well as allowing style and color, undo and redo, etc. is precisely why I am using the RTB .NET object. Care to enlighten me how you can do that otherwise in LV?

It depends. How do you do it on Linux and Mac?

[X___]

6 hours ago, ShaunR said:

It depends. How do you do it on Linux and Mac?

I am not using Linux or Mac.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

7 hours ago, X___ said:

I am not using Linux or Mac.

Some people would say that that is your problem. Others that it is a bliss. 😀

[Gepponline]

Here is my situation.
I develop applications with LabVIEW since 2000 in a small manifaturing company.
Initially we have a SSP contract. Now we don't have SSP anymore due to its cost and still at 2017version.
At the moment I develop a couple of application a year for industry 4.0 machinery.
But the most of time is mantaining of old project.
I was an enthusistic of labVIEW hoping to see it as an open source software on every PC and I was very happy when i heard about Community version...but it seems clear since the beginning that NI was boicotting it. You should went to a little corner on the bottom of the NI products to discover a free version of labVIEW (now it's a little bit easier but not so clear), but Should i have to pay thousand dollar a year to a couple of app that read and write values from PLCs?
If this is the direction...I really don't know If i will continue with labVIEW..even if I really don't want to learn a textual programming language,its syntax etc..
But this will be a company manager decision, not mine and I risk my job for this 'cause I only know LabVIEW as programming language and I use it for every kind of stuff, from data acquisition, to vision application. Motion, Db interfaces, MES and so on...

[X___]

The software subscription model is the future...says this article of 2013

I wonder whether NI has any idea of the "churn rate" discussed there. I guess the first year will give them a clue.

I also wonder whether the same brain who made the NI logo become a green deflated ..NI. is at the origin of this marketing decision? And is now gone, after having made wonders.

[A Scottish moose]

Ehh why not... <gets chair and looks intensely at camera>

I think that NI will sell in the next 2-3 years.  I agree with X on the churn rate.  There's zero chance NI comes out on top in the long term with this plan.  NXG is dead; LabVIEW as a competitive language is no more from a professional standpoint.  It's firmly an enthusiast language now.  That means like other enthusiast languages it's user base will continue to shrink from here on out.  Now you've got two options to deal with this problem; embrace it or hasten it's demise.  NI is obviously going with the later. 2-3 (maybe 5?) years of increased revenue while people work their way off the LabVIEW bandwagon (which they were going to do anyways when NXG was nuked) and then they are moving on. 

It's possible NI just understands the 'make hay while the sun is shining' concept and are going to get every value out of the product in the next half decade because, either way, LabVIEW is dead weight on the company in 5-10 years.  The other possibility is that subscription revenue has a higher impact on company value (on paper) than on-off sales.  I think subs are a 2-3x multiplier on estimated value.  If NI is looking to sell, moving everything to subs and holding for a couple years until they hit the peak of the revenue curve in 2025 and then shopping for a buyer makes the company look 50-100% more valuable than it was in 2021.  

All that's conjecture and theory. I'm more than happy to be proven incorrect, but I believe I am saying the quite part out loud here and I think that's a good thing. (I hope)

 

Best 

 

Tim

 

 

 

 

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

12 hours ago, A Scottish moose said:

Ehh why not... <gets chair and looks intensely at camera>

I think that NI will sell in the next 2-3 years.  I agree with X on the churn rate.  There's zero chance NI comes out on top in the long term with this plan.  NXG is dead; LabVIEW as a competitive language is no more from a professional standpoint.  It's firmly an enthusiast language now.  That means like other enthusiast languages it's user base will continue to shrink from here on out.  Now you've got two options to deal with this problem; embrace it or hasten it's demise.  NI is obviously going with the later. 2-3 (maybe 5?) years of increased revenue while people work their way off the LabVIEW bandwagon (which they were going to do anyways when NXG was nuked) and then they are moving on. 

LabVIEW never has been a money maker for NI directly. They were able to develop LabVIEW because of what they earned with their hardware sales. And LabVIEW was used to drive those hardware sales. A very successful model that drove others like HP Vee and such out of the market in the not very long term. Maybe HP/Agilent also was simply already to big for that market segment that they could possibly target with a product like this. The entire T&M component market isn't that huge. For HP it was what they had been starting with, but the big money was earned (and sometimes biggly lost) already in other areas. T&M was good for a steady revenue, but nothing that would stand out on the yearly shareholders report. It was unsexy for non-technicals and rather boring. That was one of the big reasons to separate HP into multiple companies. An attempt to create smaller entities that target a specific market segment and could be fine tuned in the sales and marketing efforts to the needs of that market.

About 10 years ago NI reached the size where they started to feel the limitations of the T&M component market themselves. There simply was not a big enough market left that they could capture, to continue their standard double digits yearly sales grow for much longer. Some analysts were hired to look into this and their recommendations were pretty clear. Don't try to be the wholesale everything for all little parts manufacturer in T&M, but concentrate on specific areas where big corporations with huge production lines invest their test and measurement money. Their choice fell on semiconductor testing and more recently the EV market. It has a huge potential and rather than selling ten-thousends of DAQ boxes to hundreds of integrators, they now sell and deliver hundreds of fully assembled turnkey testers to those corporate users and earn with each of them more than they could ever earn with several 1000 DAQ boxes.

What used to be NI's core business is nowadays a side line, at best a means to deliver some parts for those testers. But more and more a burden that costs a lot of money in comparison to the revenue it could even under ideal conditions generate.

If you can understand this you also can guess where NI is heading. They won't die and their shares will likely not falter. But what they will be has little to do with what they used to be. If LabVIEW still has a place in this I do not know. Personally I think it would be better if it was under the parapluie of a completely separate entity than the new NI but I also have my doubts that that would have long term surviving chances. Earning enough money with a development environments itself is a feat that almost nobody has successfully managed for a longer period. But the sometimes heard request to Open Source LabVIEW has also not a lot of chances. It would likely cause a few people to take a peek at it and then quickly loose interest, since its code base is simply to complex. And there is also the problem that the current LabVIEW source code never could be open sourced as is. There are so many patent encumbered parts in it and 3rd party license dependencies, that nobody would be legally allowed to distribute even a single build of it without first hiring an entire law firm to settle those issues. While NI owns the rights for them or acquired a license to use them, many of these licenses do not give NI the right to simply let others use them as they wish. So open sourcing LabVIEW would be a fairly big investment in time and effort before it could be done. And who is willing to foot that bill?

Edited May 4, 2022 by Rolf Kalbermatter