LabVIEW subscription model for 2022

[Taggart]

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@CyGa wrote:

Not a fan at all of NI's subscription model, but I wonder if in that case, things were explained correctly to the university ?!

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I think they definitely botched the communication around the whole subscription thing in general. I'm still not a fan of it, but I think there would be less pitchforks if they had communicated about it better.

[Hooovahh]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

NI offered this olive branch of "up to 3 years" at the current price, but for us that just means we get to pay the same as we did for one year, while losing the perpetual license, and we are to expect to pay at least 70% more from now on.  I've asked for clarification, and several non-NI people say we are just screwed, and nothing official from NI yet. 

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Someone from NI did confirm what I suspected, and that is that the locked in price is a one time agreement.  As a result I have advised our management to not purchase any LabVIEW related software for the foreseeable future.  We have a data crunching server that I think won't work without the VLA, but if it can I will also suggest we don't renew that as well.  We will stick with 2021 SP1 as the newest version we will develop for.  NI has forced our hand since we likely cannot increase our budget by the amount next year needs, and renewing now means we would develop code in LabVIEW 2022, that would need to be back saved to be used when we need to revert to 2021 anyway.

[1100fps]

I used LabVIEW for research and industrial control projects at GE Research.  Not many new hires came in with LabVIEW experience.  Those folks got up to speed quickly.

The vast majority came in with MATLAB.  MATLAB is good stuff, but not quite useful for robust industrial controls or deployment into an RTOS.  

I had always hoped that NI would make colleges a serious target for their platform.

Most frustrating.  Maybe MATLAB will become the dominate player in industrial controls at some point in the future. 

[WavePacket]

What have other people done as tangible reactions to this subscription model? I for one have essentially stopped professionally investing myself in progressing in LabVIEW. I'm now diversifying my coding skills into .net whenever possible.

I hope this thread maintains high visibility, so more and more people join in "the conversation" that subscription is supposed to bring. We could drop a link to this thread in our signatures so other forum users see it and give NI feedback. I do really like LabVIEW, but now have substantial doubt about its future, perhaps with more visibility to our concerns NI will reconsider?

[Taggart]

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@WavePacket wrote:

What have other people done as tangible reactions to this subscription model?

I started learning Python a few years ago as a hedge.

@WavePacket wrote:
perhaps with more visibility to our concerns NI will reconsider?

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One can always hope... but I doubt that is going to change.

[mcduff]

My guess is that LabVIEW will soon cease development, and resources will be turned to Python.

Much easier and less expensive to support Python for NI, no need to develop math modules, no need to develop vision tools, no need to develop ML tools. All the tool sets most engineers/scientists use are mostly already incorporated in Python. Hard to duplicate that effort to get those tools into LabVIEW. Easier to write specific modules that support NI instruments for Python users.

[crossrulz]

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@WavePacket wrote:

perhaps with more visibility to our concerns NI will reconsider?

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That boat has sailed.  The Champions gave nothing but negative feedback as soon as we found out NI decided to go to the subscription model.  This thread is now over 350 posts of negative feedback.  And there are a couple of other threads on this board with a massive amount of negative feedback.  I don't think I have seen anybody give any positive feedback.  So if NI hasn't gotten the point by now, I don't know what it will take other than a massive drop in revenue.

I'm at the point where I think the only way LabVIEW will survive is if it is separated from NI either as a new company or an open-source nonprofit (similar to Mozilla).

[Hooovahh]

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@crossrulz wrote:

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I don't think I have seen anybody give any positive feedback.  So if NI hasn't gotten the point by now, I don't know what it will take other than a massive drop in revenue.

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Are you sure that in each thread people didn't give multiple good reasons for why it makes sense for a company to make this type of change?  Because I was told that for each thread people gave multiple good reasons for why it makes sense for a company to make this type of change.  They then neglected to provide any link to these comments, but I was told they were there.  Then they stopped responding to questions.

[Taggart]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

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@crossrulz wrote:

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I don't think I have seen anybody give any positive feedback.  So if NI hasn't gotten the point by now, I don't know what it will take other than a massive drop in revenue.

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Are you sure that in each thread people didn't give multiple good reasons for why it makes sense for a company to make this type of change?  Because I was told that for each thread people gave multiple good reasons for why it makes sense for a company to make this type of change.  They then neglected to provide any link to these comments, but I was told they were there.  Then they stopped responding to questions.

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Eric Reffet made a post (I believe it is on this thread somewhere) listing what he sees as the benefits (from NI's perspective). Haven't seen any customers mentioning any benefits that they see. None of Eric's arguments seemed to make much sense to me.

[Jay14159265]

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@mcduff wrote:

My guess is that LabVIEW will soon cease development, and resources will be turned to Python.

Much easier and less expensive to support Python for NI, no need to develop math modules, no need to develop vision tools, no need to develop ML tools. All the tool sets most engineers/scientists use are mostly already incorporated in Python. Hard to duplicate that effort to get those tools into LabVIEW. Easier to write specific modules that support NI instruments for Python users.

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I agree, why does NI want to support LabVIEW? I feel like they don't! they were trying to kill it with NXG and that failed so now they are trying to kill it with subscription services. NI wants to make hardware but is stuck with supporting LabVIEW until they can kill it, but they can't just come out and say we are going to EOL labview so instead you get this protracted death by forcing users to pay through nose until they just give up and switch languages. Its win win for NI they either make a crap load of money selling a dead product to people or they get to EOL LabVIEW.