Well it's just frustrating for a lot of people that Ableton aren't an open company when it comes to release dates or product development.
It's obvious that this is a standard practice in the industry, but when a company goes for years almost releasing an upgrade a year, then goes well over two years without announcing anything more than "we're working on it" what do people expect besides a ton of threads going "WTF is up with Live 9?"
NI set up timelines for feature updates on their forums, this was implemented after horribly failing to keep to their projected updates and upgrade path. They announced new features for Maschine well before it's launch date or even the publicly known beta started.
Again, MOTU announce
DP8 for sometime in Spring, it's not a guarantee that it actually comes out in Spring, but most likely it will hit stores at the very least before the end of Summer. MOTU customers don't know all the new features just some, but they have an idea of what is going on.
Bitwig Studio is announced, the big "new" features for a DAW are showcased, beta testing hasn't started, the release date being a brand new DAW is still up in the air, but potential Bitwig customers have a roadmap and an idea of what to expect.
Meanwhile
Ableton Live customers are in the same boat as
Apple Logic users, with a three year old DAW and no roadmap. Personally I think in this case, Apple isn't a good company to model. In fact I think it's logical to complain a bit, the fact is the secrecy IMO isn't helping Ableton one bit. I know personally if I had a clue as to the direction Abeton was taking Live, and it looked good, I would be less likely to be thinking about what the price of a crossgrade to Bitwig Studio will be.
I mean besides the guy holding a gun to your head forcing you to read through another "WTF where's Live 9?" thread what is sinful about not liking a policy that isn't being undertaken by Ableton's competitors? If it were an across the board thing that all DAW companies gave out no information about upcoming releases then I could see why people are upset at the constant Live 9 threads, but far too many of the DAW makers and plug in developers are more inclusive about their progress than Ableton, and none stopped the upgrade schedule as abruptly.
For instance 64 bit.
Cakewalk released a beta of 64 bit Sonar years ago. Ableton have to be working on it, but unlike x86 OSX they haven't announced any roadmap for it, and it's obviously going to come in a paid upgrade at this point. It's not super frustrating for me, but that's because a good 64 bit machine is still months away for me, and I have knowledge that DP8 is going to be 64 bit. That just isn't the case for some people.
Anyway all I'm saying is be patient with people, it's not entirely their fault they get frustrated with what is not a DAW wide policy of total secrecy.
