Austin tech giant National Instruments exploring a possible sale - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 16, 2023, 05:07:10 pm
content: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/technology/2023/01/13/austin-national-instruments-exploring-possible-sale-technology-sector/69807646007/

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 16, 2023, 07:33:33 pm
content: What else is left for NI to do to "increase value for shareholders"? Market cap of $6B wow. Insiders have been onlysellingso 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.Theirstock(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 seeLabView Prosubscription 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?

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 16, 2023, 07:53:18 pm
content: 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.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2023, 12:20:48 am
content: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/emerson-makes-76-bln-bid-ni-corp-2023-01-17/

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2023, 12:43:18 am
content: Quote from: floobydust on January 16, 2023, 07:33:33 pmYep 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.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2023, 01:25:04 am
content: Even if it cost $50/year, the fact they can and have now demonstrated extorting their customers, I wouldn't trust them enough to use their tools. All it would take is for them to go belly up and at the end of the year, you're investment is gone.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2023, 04:56:52 am
content: Greed is good, greed is legal. It's the only way for more more more instead of growing the business which takes a lot of work.Strange that landlords cannot jack up rent without bound, yet these companies can dial up the price however they wish on something that has many customer hours invested.I wonder if it would hold in court or constitute profiteering. Martin Shkreli changed the price from USD $13.50 to $750 per pill, overnight with no consequences.Moving would be painful, so many hours invested. I hearDAQFactorydoes pretty good and I suppose writing a Labview to X converter would end their monopoly.Altium I think is in the same boat. Think of the wasted cash developing then orphaning their cloud-based products. They could add some innovative, creative features to AD but nah, exec's have to make up for it by jacking up its price. The shareholder is number one.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 18, 2023, 05:47:36 am
content: NI's hardware is exceptionally good quality, even though there are some lower cost alternatives. Their FPGA stuff is very good, but oh so expensive. Labview is superior to C, C#, Python etc if you want quickly develop a robust test program. But bloody expensive.I once worked for a company that was receiving an income $20M (mostly profit) per month income with just 70 employees. We used whatever NI stuff we wanted as price was not issue. A lot of fun. Another place I worked at was the second biggest buyer of NI equipment in Australia. NI everywhere. But NI is too expensive to the little man out there who cannot afford such equipment.I visited the NI plant in Austin, TX about 10 years ago and I must say it was the most incredible workplace. Five star. Every Friday afternoon, they had a company BBQ for all their employees. Maybe things are not so rosy at NI these days, and it is time to sell? Also, they would also have been hit by Chipageddon.