New computer software

[Porritt, David]

When Ray K Kurzweil sold the company, he got into other stuff.  He did
leading edge research on optical character recognition, and some voice
recognition research.  I think he'd had his fill of the music biz.

dp


David M. Porritt, RPT
dporritt at smu.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On
Behalf Of Mark Schecter
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 3:37 PM
To: Pianotech List
Subject: Re: New computer software

Hi, Del.

Now that we can look back on the hubris of that prediction, it's clear
that Ray's future as a futurist is perhaps a little cloudy? :-)

I think Young Chang hoped to buy their way into high-tech, and Kurzweil
hoped to sell their way out of a very deep hole. What musician could
afford $10K and up back then? Only the big names, and that's not a whole
lot of keyboard sales. They had some great ideas, and set some good
directions, but it ain't easy going up against Yamaha, Roland, Technics
and other digitals. Kurzweil led the way for a while, until the really
big companies figured out how to mow them down. Then they needed deeper
pockets to capitalize their technical chops into a more product-oriented
company.

When YC bought into Kurzweil, they picked up only the 1000 and later
series synths, opting to leave the 250, the 150 (additive), MidiBoard
(controller), and other ancillary technologies to molder. Tough luck for
the early adopters.

-Mark Schecter



Delwin D Fandrich wrote:
> 
> 
> At one of the NAMM shows I attended during the mid-1980s I sat in on
> a lecture by Ray Kurzweil during which he predicted that within 10
> years the "acoustic" piano would be a thing of the past. By the
> mid-1990s, of course, Young Chang had purchased the Kurzweil company
> either out of bankruptcy, or nearly so.
> 
> Del
>