Wow, Cakewalk was the first DAW I ever used. Well this was coming though, as the software is obsolete enough already, in fact nothing about Cakewalk inspires really from the GUI to its fiddly piano roll and the rest.
As for Renoise, I can already see myself using the last version till I live in earth, if it’s development stalls. It’s already a banging good product even it’s not all over commercial (it’s still selling and the company exists as of yet!) and has its roots in the Demoscene days and as a result has a strong legacy and user base. With Renoise the user base is a mixed bag, some are full time pros, some do it as a side pursuit making some amount of royalties, some are purely hobbyists and enthusiasts, some are beginners. If making money was the only equalizer then it’s unfair to say who is making how much just becos he uses or does not use Renoise. Many live musicians make a living playing an instrument and not via a DAW. Others in the industry work as pluggers, mixing engineers,DJs,session musicians, arrangers etc…so avenues for making cash are independent of what DAW you use. However on average it’s the programmer types and underground music composers and producers both making money or yet to make money who are the primary consistency. It still has not caught on with beatmakers that much becos hip hop has a unique gear arsenal of its own, but that is ok, things might go any direction and Renoise would be on the forefront of it in terms of providing the tracker workflow and hardware like emulated experience. Best part is that while other developers small or big come in and go out of business, Renoise still stands even if the future is uncertain for various reasons, Taktik himself being one, and considering the journey so far it in itself is an achivement, all done without any crowdfunding or typical startup trends we see today.
Other thing apart from it’s perfect sampler like workflow, for things like algorithmic composition and automation and inbuilt scripting, I don’t really think any other DAW gives this kind of interface and power, Ableton uses Max/Msp and of course similar packages are quite a few for such composition styles, so while you could use Reaktor and Max/Map or Csound and many other frameworks it’s unlikely they will produce something of the level of Renoise 's perfection just natively with their own modules so to speak. Renoise is a marvel of software engineering and it sets itself apart from the crowd in more than one ways. I have had some minor issues with some features which can be somewhat buggy but on the whole it rocks bigtime. I use a lot of hardware so I totally appreciate the simplified aesthetic of Renoise.
Those who are working in scoring or making more asset heavy work, it might pay to use some better suited products for such tasks obviously, you won’t expect someone working on a million dollar budget to suddenly do tracking mid session just cos he can! Unless he has a background in trackers or uses them creatively or for the ‘acknowledgement’ factor. He has to be concerned with scoring and using sheet music and sound mixing etc which are involved crafts of their own and they actually have no link to tracking as such directly that is. The survival rate of other companies will boil down to profits end of the day becos we live in an imperfect world and a very capitalist economy where even startups in various industries are struggling to get funds to even enter the industry let alone survive it. This monopolistic corporate culture has effectively stifled innovation and growth once a peak is attained. Once they could make Logic Pro work and sell or Protools they will stick with that one money maker and not let any one else do the talking. It’s really sad
Btw I saw a cool documentary just a few weeks back about the inane Software Patents system in America and how they bully companies and even big shots like Apple for something called ‘method patents’ where a method is described and any implementation for any developer round the world is bullied for royalties and money effectively scaring them and strangling any creativity or innovation for a small company to even ‘consider’ making anything without attracting that kind of insane attention for money from these enforcer lawyers (living in Texas it seems). So while the corporate dance takes place since WW II it’s very effective at creating monopolies.
I truly hope Renoise lives long but I also urge the developers to take stance and make the source code a shared asset among its core developers so the next team member can succeed after Taktik in case God forbid something happens to him or his code base, both are too valuable for any single person to have that much of responsibility. We are paying now but we certainly expect more on the future.
However good days may come again once AI figures out best coding patterns and automated software development, so then we can just feed the requirements and use cases to the AI programmer and he will build another Renoise from the same. Same look and same functionality but done with precise intelligence and human intervention both. The present really does suck in many ways, but the future we deserve does look challenging but very interesting. It could mean the revival of old tools and rebuilding it for more modern uses. It could also mean we lose our jobs as programmers 
cos the AI does it better…
