LabVIEW subscription model for 2022

[antonioatn]

Thats exactly it. For that price I prefer to stay with my old version, since LabVIEW has not evolved significantly (at least no 15k significantly).

If the price was like the old one, we will update every couple of years, but with this model management said that it is enough since:

- 15k is too much for a license without any updates. It is like 5 years of subscription. 

- Subscription is not an option since we cannot risk losing access to our code. 

So, we are stuck with the old version forever and planning the move away from LabVIEW.

[ooth]

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@antonioatn wrote:

- 15k is too much for a license without any updates. It is like 5 years of subscription. 

- Subscription is not an option since we cannot risk losing access to our code. 

So, we are stuck with the old version forever and planning the move away from LabVIEW.

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THIS! This sums up exactly where I am. Just make the perpetual license at the same cost of the current SaaS and get rid of the SaaS option. People want the assurance that they can access their code indefinitely.

[LVNinja]

This is a very sad story. Hurts my heart to see that such a great platform that I learned to love programming it, it's becoming a case study for future generations what not to do in business. 

How an industry leader sabotage itself, then suffered a hostile take over. 

[Eric1977]

I don't believe it was all on Emerson.

The story I am getting reading this thread is that the previous management/owners/whomever wanted to go to a subscription model but then decided to jacked up the rates to over double what a one year perpetual license would have been and now Emerson is trying to do damage control but are slow to roll out what they'd like to do and offering discounts only to those people that ask and likely knowing only through this forum post.

[1100fps]

I wonder if the updated pricing structure was to make NI more attractive to Emerson, and Emerson failed due diligence 

[SimonAldred]

This thought also crossed my mind. 

[Jay14159265]

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@beuvink wrote:

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@antonioatn wrote:

I got quoted 15k€ for the perpetual license of the professional package. That is 8k€ mor than what we paid for the 2020 license + 2 years of service. 

Thats what made it for me. 

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Thanks for sharing. @emerson: when this is the price increment to be expected, with the same for the SSP, that I always extended, a new LabVIEW license will be way out of reach. For my customers.

They will never ever pay me enough to enable me to buy such a license. I am currently asked by a major major firm for a support action on one of the tools I made in the past. I now given them a price, based on ‘old LabVIEW’ prices. They refused. I am too expensive. They say. So they rather go with someone that can do it ‘cheaper’ (as in they don’t know the system, don’t know the history and don’t know anything of the NI ecosystem).

Don’t give it much of a chance. But when multibillion companies start refusing people because of their hour rate.. that is driven by the cost of owning and learning LabVIEW.. I don’t give it much of a future when increasing the price to this level.

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Here is the issue, go here and have a look and then tell me which one of these people cares or would even notice if LabVIEW just went away. 

https://www.emerson.com/en-us/about-us/leadership

National Instruments was a medium size engineering firm that had a vision of which LabVIEW was one of the pillars of the entire company. Of course during this phase, LabVIEW was competitive, innovative, supported, etc. Now, Emerson is a mega corporation that has been around for 130 years. I would guess that most people at Emerson don't even know what LabVIEW is.

Since there is no statements from Emerson on what is going on with LabVIEW, I propose some fan fiction: 

I think that at this point some division manager in Emerson is weighing their options if LabVIEW is worth keeping alive as a product, which means it needs to be profitable or at least drive revenue. Because that is how large, long lived corporations work, they don't just make and support products for fun. Emerson/NI wanted to see what the market would bear so they tried their experiment, I guess the market said no, so now they are adjusting but the whole big ship hard to turn paradigm is coming into play as I'm sure there are some middle management type people that have already made multi year financial projections based on subscriptions and they are now in a bad position, they still need to hit the projections. Also and possibly worse, the sale of NI to Emerson had financial projections based on LabVIEW subscriptions and now the bean counters at Emerson are taking a very close look at LabVIEW's future as a product. So the real problem is that if LabVIEW does not hit the financial projections after a few years, that's when the big boss comes in and simply turns the lights off in the LabVIEW wing. I'm sure there are people in Emerson very dedicated to making LabVIEW succeed, hopefully they can figure it out.  

[_Bryan]

Did NI also change the online training options when they went to the subscription format?  I remember having access to many more course options in the past.  I don't use the training very often, but it was a good resource to use every now and then.  I put down on my review this year to take a training course through the NI training we pay for.  But looking at the link below explains it, only Core 1 classes.

Maybe I missed the change, but having the online training was a nice feature of having a license with the SSP.  Or at least it used to be.

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019SH7SAM&l=en-US  

[mcduff]

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@Jay14159265 wrote:

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Also and possibly worse, the sale of NI to Emerson had financial projections based on LabVIEW subscriptions and now the bean counters at Emerson are taking a very close look at LabVIEW's future as a product. So the real problem is that if LabVIEW does not hit the financial projections after a few years, that's when the big boss comes in and simply turns the lights off in the LabVIEW wing. I'm sure there are people in Emerson very dedicated to making LabVIEW succeed, hopefully they can figure it out.  

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Besides all of that, there has been a real brain drain at NI. A lot of the "Blue Posts" on this forum are from retired NI employees. The ones that are left don't seem as familiar with LabVIEW as previous employees and maybe not as invested.

My guess is that in the end they will create drivers, API's, etc, for .net and python for their equipment. It's too hard and expensive to try and keep up feature development in those other programming languages.

[AhmedEisawy]

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@antonioatn wrote:

I got quoted 15k€ for the perpetual license of the professional package. That is 8k€ mor than what we paid for the 2020 license + 2 years of service. 

Thats what made it for me. 

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That doesn't look like they've included a discount. You should request it. Please reach out to me directly if you don't get it.