An apology, and a disclosure
Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:49 am
In the past several days, I have made some technical criticisms of the KRONOS that I personally believe are valid. Along the way, I've gotten over-excited at a couple of points, and I've managed to say some stupid things. Dan Philips has expressed annoyance privately, and Neroesque has expressed it more strongly here on the forum. Both are right to have done so, and I thank them.
So I want to apologize, and attempt to explain. In order to do that, a disclosure is necessary: I am part of a small group that is seriously looking at buildiing a next-generation synth. If we decide to go forward, we can probably raise the money to do it. Whether we can bring together the expertise remains to be seen. If we proceed, our credibility will be judged by the market a few years down the road. So there is the disclosure part.
First, to set the record straight, what do I think of the KRONOS today, as it exists and as I've used it? And what do I think of the KRONOS engineers? The KRONOS is remarkable, and the accomplishment that it represents as an engineering result is astounding. It is especially astounding when you take the pricing and currency constraints into account: to meet a $3700 USD target at today's currency rates at any reasonable margin, the KRONOS build has to be a lot cheaper than any previous workstation. And the KRONOS engineers met that challenge, and then they went ahead and pretty much kicked the ass of the workstation competition for the next three years. I have tried to say that consistently on these forums, but I have not always succeeded. Since some people feel that I have been disrespectful to the Korg team in Japan, I wanted to say it again, all in one place.
So if I feel this positive about the product and the team that built it, how did I manage to get so carried away that I said such unfair things - up to, and including, challenging Korg's forward-looking vision. Strangely enough, it came out of sympathy for the overwhelming pain that I believe Korg (along with Yamaha, Roland, and Kurzweil) will have to overcome in the next few years because of their success.
You see, Korg didn't just change the game. They changed the landscape. Setting aside products that are already in the design pipeline, it seems to me that the era of custom hardware synthesis is now definitively over. In the same way that IBM created the PC standard by building a low cost device from commodity parts, so has Korg. It is utterly brilliant, and it took an incredibly sustained vision, and I am deeply ashamed that of all the words I might have chosen to express my fears about the future, I chose "vision". That was an act of incredible disrespect, and I apologize to everyone at Korg.
So why do I think that Korg is about to face such great pain?
In brief, the competitors now have to match Korg's build costs, and the only real way to do that is by shifting to commodity hardware coupled with software-implemented synthesis. So they will. Which means that Korg has just launched a global race for a standardized synthesizer/workstation platform.
Of course, IBM didn't win that race. In fact, none of the incumbent computer companies won that race, because they were unable to make the transition to what (then) were called "open systems" (meaning third-party extensible at many layers; unrelated to what we call "open source" today).
Bill Gates and a young, innovative company called Compaq did that.
The migration from a proprietary world-view to an open standard world-view is infinitely harder than the migration from proprietary hardware to commodity hardware inside a closed device. I lived through it, at close hand, in the software industry. It hurt us. A lot. And it is now going to hurt Korg and the others. It is going to challenge many things that Korg (and Yamaha, and Roland) now perceive as their cherished core advantages, and it is going to turn some of those things into liabilities. Just as it did in the PC world.
And so I believe that Korg's next great "vision" challenge is to stay ahead of the tsunami that the KRONOS has just unleashed (I am sorry; I realize that this is a very painful metaphor right now). Perhaps Tsutomu-san had even greater vision than I already imagine, and Korg has anticipated and planned for this change successfully, and Seiki-san will be able to guide and complete that transform. In my experience, if any group of people in the world can achieve such a thing by overwhelming discipline, hard work, and foresight it is the Japanese. No other organization in history has ever accomplished such a thing, and I wish Korg great luck in the attempt.
For those at Korg, I hope, at least, that the thoughts and concerns behind my ill-chosen words now make a small shadow of sense, even if you do not agree. And I hope that you will accept my apology for those badly chosen words.
I know that many on this forum will feel compelled to challenge my assumptions or my beliefs in defense of Korg, and particularly my view that standardization is now inevitable. I wish to leave this to stand as an apology, and I do not plan to engage in those discussions in this thread.
Jonathan S. Shapiro
So I want to apologize, and attempt to explain. In order to do that, a disclosure is necessary: I am part of a small group that is seriously looking at buildiing a next-generation synth. If we decide to go forward, we can probably raise the money to do it. Whether we can bring together the expertise remains to be seen. If we proceed, our credibility will be judged by the market a few years down the road. So there is the disclosure part.
First, to set the record straight, what do I think of the KRONOS today, as it exists and as I've used it? And what do I think of the KRONOS engineers? The KRONOS is remarkable, and the accomplishment that it represents as an engineering result is astounding. It is especially astounding when you take the pricing and currency constraints into account: to meet a $3700 USD target at today's currency rates at any reasonable margin, the KRONOS build has to be a lot cheaper than any previous workstation. And the KRONOS engineers met that challenge, and then they went ahead and pretty much kicked the ass of the workstation competition for the next three years. I have tried to say that consistently on these forums, but I have not always succeeded. Since some people feel that I have been disrespectful to the Korg team in Japan, I wanted to say it again, all in one place.
So if I feel this positive about the product and the team that built it, how did I manage to get so carried away that I said such unfair things - up to, and including, challenging Korg's forward-looking vision. Strangely enough, it came out of sympathy for the overwhelming pain that I believe Korg (along with Yamaha, Roland, and Kurzweil) will have to overcome in the next few years because of their success.
You see, Korg didn't just change the game. They changed the landscape. Setting aside products that are already in the design pipeline, it seems to me that the era of custom hardware synthesis is now definitively over. In the same way that IBM created the PC standard by building a low cost device from commodity parts, so has Korg. It is utterly brilliant, and it took an incredibly sustained vision, and I am deeply ashamed that of all the words I might have chosen to express my fears about the future, I chose "vision". That was an act of incredible disrespect, and I apologize to everyone at Korg.
So why do I think that Korg is about to face such great pain?
In brief, the competitors now have to match Korg's build costs, and the only real way to do that is by shifting to commodity hardware coupled with software-implemented synthesis. So they will. Which means that Korg has just launched a global race for a standardized synthesizer/workstation platform.
Of course, IBM didn't win that race. In fact, none of the incumbent computer companies won that race, because they were unable to make the transition to what (then) were called "open systems" (meaning third-party extensible at many layers; unrelated to what we call "open source" today).
Bill Gates and a young, innovative company called Compaq did that.
The migration from a proprietary world-view to an open standard world-view is infinitely harder than the migration from proprietary hardware to commodity hardware inside a closed device. I lived through it, at close hand, in the software industry. It hurt us. A lot. And it is now going to hurt Korg and the others. It is going to challenge many things that Korg (and Yamaha, and Roland) now perceive as their cherished core advantages, and it is going to turn some of those things into liabilities. Just as it did in the PC world.
And so I believe that Korg's next great "vision" challenge is to stay ahead of the tsunami that the KRONOS has just unleashed (I am sorry; I realize that this is a very painful metaphor right now). Perhaps Tsutomu-san had even greater vision than I already imagine, and Korg has anticipated and planned for this change successfully, and Seiki-san will be able to guide and complete that transform. In my experience, if any group of people in the world can achieve such a thing by overwhelming discipline, hard work, and foresight it is the Japanese. No other organization in history has ever accomplished such a thing, and I wish Korg great luck in the attempt.
For those at Korg, I hope, at least, that the thoughts and concerns behind my ill-chosen words now make a small shadow of sense, even if you do not agree. And I hope that you will accept my apology for those badly chosen words.
I know that many on this forum will feel compelled to challenge my assumptions or my beliefs in defense of Korg, and particularly my view that standardization is now inevitable. I wish to leave this to stand as an apology, and I do not plan to engage in those discussions in this thread.
Jonathan S. Shapiro
.... in excessive, repetitive and irrelevant length...the comments were beyond a personal opinion and discussion of the product