When Expensive Products Get Killed Off
With the latest news from TC Helicon in regards to the GoXLR's support team being completely laid off, what happens to your product that you've paid hundreds of dollars for? At this time we really don't know but the main thing that we all should start figuring out even before those employees get their pink slips is to prepare for the worst. We've seen countless time lately in the current economic climate we find ourselves in, is that companies of any size are quick to remove expensive resources like their employees. Of course with cost cutting measures as severe as this, it's never a good sign to see those hard working people who've spun countless working hours into the products be the first to go. I mean, there are usually other methods of reducing financial overhead first before killing off the company with a death of a thousand cuts.
In the case of TC Helicon we haven't seen much if anything at all come out of the company ever since the release of the GoXLR Mini and not long after the GoXLR Mic. Of course they've produced other products for audio interfaces such as the Go TWIN, a 2-channel audio/MIDI interface but for the live streaming production side of things, there's been nothing. This isn't to say that during the time of economic downturn and rising inflation we've seen other companies layoff hundreds if not thousands of people but, in those cases they were simply returning to levels that were pre pandemic levels. Companies were hiring like crazy during the lockdowns and some cases the employees were simply getting paid to do nothing.
So what should you do? In the time that we have left as TC Helicon hasn't stated the software will be going away, you should be running under the assumption that it will. Download and save a copy of the GoXLR installer software so that you have a backup of it. Reach out to TC Helicon and make yourself known that you don't want product support to go away and be left with an expensive paperweight. Keep an eye out on the open source Discord that was mentioned as we all should be more aware of what the status of the software we use and it's progression.
