t3hhYeah, it's not great news that #Elektron is now mostly owned by an #investor. Sole orientation to #profit margins will probably not do any favours to the fragile ecosystem these types of #companies are existing, balancing sales figures with uniqueness and strong #product concepts. Sadly this has been part of the problem for some time now. The concepts are not making lot of sense lately. I'd say soon after the original #Digitakt and #Digitone. Hence the need for an investor now.
I think the problems started much earlier for #Elektron and were foremost related to general approach to #product #design. When their #Analog series of flagship #synthesizers were first introduced in 2012, a controversial decision was made that these machines would not get an ability to sequence external #MIDI #instruments. That was the moment when alarm bell was ringing for anybody cared to listen. If you handicap your main product out of the gate, how can you expect success on the market?
However, I don't believe this was the thinking among #Elektron at that time. For them this probably felt like a necessary step to protect their previous #flagship #instrument #Octatrack that was released in a previous year and was maybe not #selling according to their expectations. So they decided to handicap the new line of instruments to support the sales of what many customers were saying was the best instrument they have ever made. And sure enough, Octatrack was/is an amazing instrument.
This #strategy is called #feature #segmentation and it's loosely based on ideas of (reverse) game theory. It assumes that the music production #market has a specific size and it's important to avoid cannibalisation their sales or even try to oversell the market. This is fairly common #business strategy, however it's risky, especially for the companies in niche markets with low sales volume, like Elektron was/is. If you are reducing the functionality of your main products you may jeopardise sales