i hear you Bill but the comparrison has some validity because all product sales are driven by demand not the financial resources to manufacture. If i show a bank or any investor a full order book i will get the money to manufacture. So far the demand for 'open products' is miniscule compared to those products that are not as 'open ' (because in reality there is no totally closed or totally open single instrument ).

Yamahas R&D is spent on making products that their reserach tells them the market WANTS AND THEY CAN MAKE A PROFIT FROM. Thats why they make products that are so popular with real world musicians and not the miniscule segment of musicians that want to spend 90 % of their time instaling software, updateing software, managing integration conflicts.... for example having to remove harddrive 'A' because the 'open keyboard 'did not happen to like it !!!


openlab products have had lots of big ticket promotion and big endorsers such as Teddy Riley , Timberland , Morris Hayes, Keith Emerson etc and they went bankrupt a few years ago only to be rescued by another company and not surprisingly ALL of these endorsing artists without exception use other manaufacturers instruments in their music production from korg to roland to yamaha.

That tells me that as far as the future is concerned 'open v closed instrument' is a redundant argument. The facts are that even when people could choose to exclusively use an open product (even the product they endorse) they still choose to use other manufactures products to make their music for whatever reason.

The truth is if you were to listen to a product demo of any open keyboard to any closed one you would not be able to tell if the sounds coming from the instrument were the sounds that came from the factory produced unit or not . You would not be able to tell if the musician produced the music on the instrument the sound came from or from an external sequencer or a software sequencer added to the instruiment subsequent to manufacture.

What you would be able to judge is the quality of what you heard and thats down to the musician and not the isntrument. That has always been the case, that will always be the case .

As for the Mediastaion, i have said plenty about the endless updates that never quite transform the instrument into anything other than an incomplete beta testing product.

The unavoidable complexity (whether real or percieved) that comes with open keyboards means that it will only ever appeal to a small market and that is why its total sales will always compare less favouribly to any closed keyboard.