Prosoniq Discontinues Windows Products

Friday March 27, 2009. 11:54 AM, by Nantho

Prosoniq announces that it will discontinue development of its Windows products starting June 1st, 2009. Existing Windows products will continued to be sold until that date, and updates will be available until the end of 2009. Users who wish to crossgrade from the latest version of their Windows product to the Mac counterpart can do so for free by contacting Prosoniq via its contact form.

Bernhard Bouché, CEO at Prosoniq says that the Windows platform, though having a larger market share, has become increasingly unattractive due to the widespread availability of pirated Prosoniq products. "We were, and still are, using a serial number based authorization. We believe that moving from this relatively easy and painless method to a more complicated and error prone way of protecting our products is counter productive for our users. Our past experience with dongled products shows that implementing a dongle based copy protection is prohibitively expensive for affordable add-on products like our plug-ins, and makes selling over the internet problematic", says Bouché. Since Windows product sales in 2008 have been virtually nonexistent Prosoniq has eventually decided to put the focus once again back exclusively on developing Mac products, which have been selling extremely well. "Even though we are aware of the danger of being dependent on a single company we are primarily a Mac based company", Bouché says. "Being a small company developing highly specialized products we don't aim for the mass market", he adds. "Our experience shows that 90% of our customers are on the Mac anyway. We believe that by tending to products on one platform only we will be able to make better products and provide better support. Since crossgrading to the Mac is free we hope to encourage our Windows users to consider using them on a Mac when they are ready". He also says that Prosoniq will reconsider developing for Windows when he sees a potential for more sales and less piracy, or when targeting other markets.

Windows product development had been one requirement for Prosoniq's relationship with their former distributor, Steinberg. Prosoniq and Steinberg parted in 2001 but are still successfully working together as technology licensing partners. All Prosoniq key technologies, such as MPEX, will continue to be available for licensing on both Windows and Mac.