HYPNAGOGIA wrote:... I suppose most importantly, frequent updates.
You know, there was a time when Orion got more updates than anything else around and that never helped grow the user base. I think, ultimately, what makes Orion so good is also why it is hard to attract customers. And that is the simple fact that Rich has always been far more interested in making Orion better than he has in adding whatever features people asked for the most. To put it another way, where companies like ImageLine have focused on doing the things that will sell more FL Studio licenses, Rich has always focused on making Orion better. Rich has always been about quality, not quantity and I think that works much better when you are selling VSTi than when you are trying to sell a sequencer, probably because you don't have to deal with cognitive biases so much (see below).
Teksonik wrote:It (Orion) may have everything he or you need but obviously it doesn't have everything the vast majority of the market needs or the discussions about it would include more than a half dozen users.
The logic behind this statement is deeply flawed. Firstly, I'd be very surprised if even 5% of working musicians/producers in the world had ever heard of Orion, much less given it a try. You simply cannot make an informed decision about a product if you don't even know it exists. Orion's public profile fell off a cliff at around version 5, for whatever reason.
But the biggest flaw is the assumption that just because one product meets the needs of every possible user that it would be popular. It is simply one of dozens of applications that does so, which means if you are already using something that works for you, you are not motivated to see what else might be out there. And once someone rolls the dice and makes a decision, you then have a huge confirmation bias hurdle to overcome to get them to admit their first decision was wrong and switch. Once people become invested in a product, it is almost impossible to get them to switch to something else, no matter how much better it might be for them. That's why people keep buying the same brand of car and shopping at the same supermarket.