[HN Gopher] National Instruments acquired by Emerson
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National Instruments acquired by Emerson
Author : ChuckMcM
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-08-12 19:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ni.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ni.com)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I must have missed this when it happened last year (April
| apparently). Perhaps not surprisingly I associate the name
| "Emerson" with comically large integrated stereos (boom boxes).
| But apparently they are building up a test and measurement group.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Emerson Electric (in TFA) does not make consumer electronics,
| that's another company called Emerson Radio Corporation.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I am aware, and it is unfortunate for Emerson Electric in
| terms of branding things in the electronics space. I don't
| doubt they will retain the National Instruments and/or
| Digilent brands for that reason.
|
| It will make me chuckle every time I see that Digilent banner
| "An Emerson company."
| osigurdson wrote:
| I'm a little surprised that a > 1 year article about an
| acquisition in a somewhat niche industry is front page Hacker
| News.
| guerrilla wrote:
| They seem pretty big, but maybe people are confusing them with
| to old famous National Semiconductor for some reason (sold to
| TI in 2011.)
| neltnerb wrote:
| I suppose it's fair to describe both as niche, even though
| basically every facility that requires high reliability
| controls (talking chemicals, energy, medical, etc) uses
| Emerson. They're enormous, but they do focus on one kind of
| thing.
|
| It happens to also be what NI does (did) except NI did it in a
| way that was more accessible to education and hobbyists. Still
| expensive, but with things like educational toolkits using
| LabView as a base they have products that address the market
| for lower cost, lower reliability, but more flexible
| prototyping tools that I've never seen Emerson focus on at all.
|
| But yeah, I knew about this a year ago because it's the kind of
| thing that matters a lot for my work. And since then I've known
| to not build any new prototypes that use NI software and
| instead move towards anything else...
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > And since then I've known to not build any new software
| that uses NI software[sic] and instead move towards anything
| else...
|
| Do you mean "not to build any new software that uses NI
| _hardware_ ", or are you specifically averse to Emerson's
| software dev practices even though you trust them to produce
| good hardware?
|
| On that note, who is your new preferred vendor for DAQ
| hardware? Some of the stuff that NI allowed you to build with
| cRIO or PC-based multifunction DAQ hardware like their
| PCIe-6321 etc. was pretty unique. There's not a lot of off-
| the-shelf gear for on the order of $1000 that can do 100 kHz
| digital/analog signal acquisition.
|
| I like Delta Tau PMAC gear for electronic servo control
| (though their recent acquisition by Omron seems to be having
| a similar impact as I expect Emerson is having at NI) and
| Delta Motion for hydraulics (not _yet_ bought out by anyone,
| they seem to successfully transition to employee-owned after
| Natchwey retired last year, but time will tell)... but
| neither is a true multifunction DAQ system like NI.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Nothing like asking a question on a forum and Natchwey
| answering with 3 pages of mathcad solving 7th order motion
| equations
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| At my company we've had success with Advantech (Japanese)
| DAQs.
|
| I always considered NI best for research labs / benchtop
| measurements, and this acquisition seems like a poor fit
| because NI was pricy but with good end user support, while
| Emerson likes to have very expensive/little support.
| kragen wrote:
| i'm not sure electronic test equipment is really that niche
| here
| bad_username wrote:
| I spent a minute in a state of mild shock, thinking it's Native
| Instruments that got acquired...
| RIMR wrote:
| That would be a ridiculous acquisition. The shock was
| justified.
| svaha1728 wrote:
| They were bought by a private equity company in 2021. Would
| love to know more about the Berlin programming scene in the
| 90s. The initial minds behind Generator/Reaktor were incredibly
| inspiring.
| etimberg wrote:
| Not surprising. I worked at NI for my first job out of university
| and developing software there was so painful
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Can you elaborate?
| etimberg wrote:
| Some highlights that I remember include:
|
| * One project where the CI took something like 48 hours
|
| * Trying to apply waterfall hardware engineering processes to
| software development
|
| * Mostly hiring devs fresh from university so there was a ton
| of group think due to a lack of new ideas
|
| * Low salaries so most of the devs left once they got
| promoted beyond a junior level
| josh-sematic wrote:
| I had similarly painful experiences. Also the project I was
| on was _mostly_ in maintenance mode, with mostly junior
| engineers out of college on it who had little experience
| with that particular code. Not many tests. Lots of code
| archaeology and "I'm crossing my fingers I didn't just
| break some subset of the enormous configuration space of
| this tool"
| etimberg wrote:
| The code archaeology was probably the most fun part for
| me but I had so much free time to do that because my
| projects were mostly maintenance as well
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| You forgot "cuts the salary of everyone each year, ensuring
| anyone who can update a resume finds a new job"
| etimberg wrote:
| Never had that experience while I was there, but about a
| year after I left the entire office I was in was closed
| and everyone laid off
| sumtechguy wrote:
| a friend of mine has worked there for 25+ years. I keep
| telling him work _somewhere_ else and make more money...
| Kirby64 wrote:
| NI has a nickname in the industry:
|
| NI = No Income. Keep in mind, they're also HQ'd in Austin,
| TX, which is essentially the most expensive city in Texas.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Interesting, I've ended up spending thousands on NI
| hardware at my last four jobs
| Kirby64 wrote:
| The cost of their hardware and software is unrelated to
| the salaries they pay their employees.
| Ocerge wrote:
| Same, I left in 2014. I left after a couple of years to almost
| double my pay and not work on a Linux RT USB driver directly
| out of college for which I had no desire to be a SME, but in
| hindsight I think the coworkers I had there were smarter than
| anywhere else I've worked since (including Google). They paid
| absolutely nothing but seemed to have good culture, at least
| where I was at the time.
| Lammy wrote:
| Interesting to see a two-character dot-com domain.
| Updated Date: 2023-08-25T05:22:08Z Creation Date:
| 1994-05-20T04:00:00Z Registry Expiry Date:
| 2024-09-29T13:53:33Z
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Interesting to see a two-character dot-com domain.
|
| Indeed. There's also this one letter dot-com with 500 million
| MAU: _x.com_.
| RachelF wrote:
| NI used to be big and well known to the electronic engineers in
| the 1980's and 90's who helped develop the early Internet.
|
| See ti.com - Texas Instruments
| azhenley wrote:
| The acquisition was in 2023.
| rossant wrote:
| (2023)
| koshinae wrote:
| Oh, my... I've spent there 8 years.
|
| I wonder what took so long to rekt themselves into an acquisition
| after Dr. T retired.
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