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| Austin tech giant National Instruments exploring a possible sale |
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| joeqsmith:
https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/01/13/austin-national-instruments-exploring-possible-sale-technology-sector/69807646007/ |
| floobydust:
What else is left for NI to do to "increase value for shareholders"? Market cap of $6B wow. Insiders have been only selling so a sale does not look good. It just seems to be a company with way too much fat. They have had crazy high product pricing, I think they outpriced themselves long ago, subscription model included. Their stock (average) is downhill, despite all the noise, it seems to have lost all long term steam. I've used their products on and off since the late 1990's and keep running into them in test fixtures. They have feature rich products, people make careers doing Labview programming, it's powerful if graphical programming is your thing. But purchasing Labview always caused a shitstorm because it's stupid expensive only Mr. Big Co. the Fortune 500 companies could afford, but not SME. I see LabView Pro subscription going for CAD $4K/year now and the base edition $740/year, simply too expensive. I'll never design in NI products because after the huge costs getting the equipment and software, you find out the DAQ board loaded with FPGA and IC's only has one timer available. I remember having $1,000 NIDAQ boards and needing shaft RPM and "nope" you have no free resources on the board, the timer is used by the A/D lol. What you can't put a cheesy MCU on the board for something as common as RPM lol. To this day, their $1,000 USB DAQ same thing "1 timer". At least I have some marketing coffee cups, t-shirts, posters lol. Dinosaurs are fat, need big margins eating lots to stay alive and all that is OK- as long as their monopoly exists. NI it's a huge ecosystem and many fanboys, the Fortune 500 customers can pay the price. But thankfully many good competitors are out there so I don't expect this business to have growth really. Who will buy them? |
| coppercone2:
Ehh I don't think I will shed any tears and fond memories about NI hardware. that one feels like driving on a gravel road, at best. I think its been generally found to be quite a big source of frustration at work. |
| joeqsmith:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/emerson-makes-76-bln-bid-ni-corp-2023-01-17/ |
| xrunner:
--- Quote from: floobydust on January 16, 2023, 07:33:33 pm ---I've used their products on and off since the late 1990's and keep running into them in test fixtures. They have feature rich products, people make careers doing Labview programming, it's powerful if graphical programming is your thing. But purchasing Labview always caused a shitstorm because it's stupid expensive only Mr. Big Co. the Fortune 500 companies could afford, but not SME. I see LabView Pro subscription going for CAD $4K/year now and the base edition $740/year, simply too expensive. --- End quote --- Yep same here. In '90's we had NI DAQ boards in PCs, with GPIB control boards too. I wrote a lot of LabView stuff to control instruments, mainly Tektronix and HP stuff, and collected instrumentation data from items under test. Company spent good money on all those NI products. Fond memories. |
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