Reds Posted January 30 Report Share Posted January 30 (edited) Y'all should read the PDF versions of the letters Emerson sent before getting your panties in a bunch about LabVIEW's future. Quoting from one of Emerson's letters: We are very excited about the combination of our two firms and the potential we can achieve together. Emerson has long admired NI as a technology leader in the electronic test and measurement industry, a complementary adjacency to our Automation Solutions business with a similar technology stack of intelligent devices, controls, and software. We have been particularly impressed with NI’s portfolio including modular intelligent devices and the LabVIEW suite of offerings, as well as NI’s industry stewardship over many decades in this space. Combining NI with Emerson would lead to significant opportunities for both of our teams and further develop our position as a premier global automation company. Edited January 30 by Reds Quote Link to comment
Reds Posted January 30 Report Share Posted January 30 (edited) 9 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said: That is partly NI's work. They were pretty aggressive about defending their idea by applying for quite a few patents and defending them too. Of course if you go to the trouble to apply for a patent you have to be willing to defend it, otherwise you eventually use the right to a patent anyways. And they did buy up some companies that had something similar to LabVIEW, such as DasyLab for instance, although in my opinion DasyLab didn't quite go beyond the standard "wire some icons together" similar to what HPVee did, and what Node-Red is doing too. But they tried to use some structures that were darn close to LabVIEW loops and that was a prominent NI patent. So NI eventually approached them and made them the offer to either buy them or meet them in front of a judge. The rest is history. 100% this. Also, don't forget they famously sued MathWorks when MatLab started to roll out graphical programming tools that looked a little bit too much like LabVIEW. That cold war finally ended, but only very recently. Edited January 30 by Reds Quote Link to comment
Rolf Kalbermatter Posted January 30 Report Share Posted January 30 1 hour ago, Reds said: We have been particularly impressed with NI’s portfolio including modular intelligent devices and the LabVIEW suite of offerings, as well as NI’s industry stewardship over many decades in this space. Combining NI with Emerson would lead to significant opportunities for both of our teams and further develop our position as a premier global automation company. I'm not convinced. They either have no idea about how complicated LabVIEW is or just hoped they could put some sand in the NI managers eyes by teasing them with what they thought is still NI's pet child. Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted January 30 Report Share Posted January 30 5 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said: I'm not convinced. They either have no idea about how complicated LabVIEW is or just hoped they could put some sand in the NI managers eyes by teasing them with what they thought is still NI's pet child. Me neither. What exactly are "the LabVIEW suite of offerings"? (Please don't tell me BridgeVIEW or whatever they are calling it now ) Quote Link to comment
Rolf Kalbermatter Posted January 30 Report Share Posted January 30 (edited) 2 hours ago, ShaunR said: Me neither. What exactly are "the LabVIEW suite of offerings"? (Please don't tell me BridgeVIEW or whatever they are calling it now ) My snarky response would be LabVIEW NXG. 😀 More realistically you could consider the LabVIEW realtime and LabVIEW FPGA as parts of a bigger suite. BridgeVIEW morphed into the LabVIEW DSC (Data Logging and Supervisory Control) Module long ago (LabVIEW 7 or so), which is an addon, similar to Vision Control and such. But it is legacy: 32-bit only, not really improved for a long time, it is still using SQL Server Express 2012, which is not compatible to the latest Windows versions. Edited January 30 by Rolf Kalbermatter Quote Link to comment
hooovahh Posted February 2 Report Share Posted February 2 Topic split to here discussing WATS and Virinco. 1 Quote Link to comment
X___ Posted February 5 Report Share Posted February 5 On 1/28/2023 at 2:36 AM, Rolf Kalbermatter said: There is only a relatively small development team left for LabVIEW, apparently mostly located in Penang, Malaysia, if I interpret the job offers on the NI site correctly and they are probably scared to death about the huge and involved legacy code base that LabVIEW is and don’t dare to touch anything more substantial out of well founded fear to break a lot of things with more involved changes. I was puzzled by that statement and since I am unable to do anything more demanding at this time, I checked the job offers at NI. There are 4 sites: Texas, Costa-Rica, Hungary, Malaysia. Most of the software-related postings appear to be API and driver related. I would be surprised that any of the frontend software is developed outside a tight-knit group in Austin (especially because NI is not an open source software developer, where delocalization is the rule). Quote Link to comment
X___ Posted February 5 Report Share Posted February 5 On 1/30/2023 at 12:24 AM, Rolf Kalbermatter said: That is partly NI's work. They were pretty aggressive about defending their idea by applying for quite a few patents and defending them too. Of course if you go to the trouble to apply for a patent you have to be willing to defend it, otherwise you eventually loose the right to a patent anyways. And they did buy up some companies that had something similar to LabVIEW, such as DasyLab for instance, although in my opinion DasyLab didn't quite go beyond the standard "wire some icons together" similar to what HPVee did, and what Node-Red is doing too. But they tried to use some structures that were darn close to LabVIEW loops and that was a prominent NI patent. So NI eventually approached them and made them the offer to either buy them or meet them in front of a judge. The rest is history. Some of the earlier patents (still listed in Help>>Patents...) have long expired. The latest is dated 2014. Quote Link to comment
Rolf Kalbermatter Posted February 5 Report Share Posted February 5 3 hours ago, X___ said: Some of the earlier patents (still listed in Help>>Patents...) have long expired. The latest is dated 2014. Sure you could nowadays create almost a clone without fearing an NI letter to arrive. But who wants to do that? Quote Link to comment
Popular Post X___ Posted March 3 Popular Post Report Share Posted March 3 And the saga continues... https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/national-instruments-picks-fortive-keysight-challengers-emersons-bid-sources-2023-03-03/ 3 Quote Link to comment
crossrulz Posted March 3 Report Share Posted March 3 (edited) Keysight buying NI would be monopolistic (2 of the biggest T&M companies merging). Not likely to happen, but I could see Keysight buying Digilent (an NI company) and Emerson buying the rest of NI. I'm not familiar with Fortive, so I may have to look into them. But sale by early April?! At least its not far from now. Edit: Fortive owns Fluke and Tektronix. Them buying NI would be interesting as well. Would the parent company force NI and Tek to work together on a PXI scope again? Edited March 3 by crossrulz Quote Link to comment
ShaunR Posted March 3 Report Share Posted March 3 Quote National Instruments put itself up for sale in January Quote Link to comment
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