Wednesday, 26 February 2003

Gibson's MaGIC GMICS ::

Gibson’s new Ethernet guitar got Slashdotted this week.

There was a story about it in EE Times recently:

“The mainstream guitar player doesn’t have the slightest interest in this,” said Art Thompson, a senior editor of GuitarPlayer magazine.

...

“Sometimes we joke that we work for a company that thinks in terms of wood and glue. We don’t have gazillions of dollars for all kinds of fancy test equipment,” Vallier [a member of the design team] said.

Gibson replaced the Opcode booth with this GMICS box at NAMM 2000 in Los Angeles

That same joke was passed around darkly by Opcode users when the story behind Opcode’s demise was discussed on an Opcode users’ mailing list. Opcode was not the first company to be acquired by Gibson, get shut down, and leave the founders and key employees wondering why Gibson was interested in the first place. The information on Gibson’s site, however, make clear what I’ve long suspected, that Gibson’s CEO has been feverishly persuing the digital guitar for a long time, and that every one of those acquisitions had at least a potential role in its development.

If I were a manufacturer contemplating using MaGIC (formerly GMICS, Gibson Musical Interface Control System or some such), I would carefully consider how Gibson basically let Opcode’s OMS wither, though it remains the standard for MIDI software/hardware connectivity on Mac OS 9 even now, over 6 years since its last major update. Gibson is providing a 10 year royalty-free license on MaGIC, but then what will the license terms be after that?

To be fair to Gibson, this idea of being able to sell a new digital guitar to everyone who already owns a guitar makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.

As if to foreshadow my Gibson moment at NAMM this year (last month), on arrival at the Orange County airport, I laughed at the sight of a Gibson Cafe there. Two nights later, I was standing outside my hotel, and ran into a Gibson employee who revealed that he was on a mission to close an office the next day.

References:
Gibson's Magic GMICS in the news again (30 December 2003)