Loyalty is different from investment and commitment, which is a gamble.
We have gambled upon Cubase being suitable in the long term for our needs. Two significant factors go into that:
a) It has to be a long-term commitment because we have to make a whole lot of downstream choices (involving money and time) about the other software and hardware we want to use with it, let alone that required just to learn to use it.
b) Because of the long-term commitment required, we have to be reasonably sure that a product will be flexible and capable enough for the types of things we will want to do with it in its lifetime, but also that the product’s development will likely continue along those lines for that time, as well as incorporating newer capabilities, whether due to their inspiration, or reaction to the marketplace.
Both of these make our relationship with SB require substantially more personal commitment on our side than theirs. Theirs is aggregate, ours is personal. I think this is something that is lost by those equating Cubase with most other products. Most other products don’t have that many critical cross dependencies. TV? No. Car? Several critical selection criteria, but it is easy to choose another make or model next time.
It is this that SB, like many companies, could go a long may to build into their customer-relationship thinking.