Interesting. Magix is supposed to be doing most of the marketing, I believe, and dropped the ball, somewhat. Yes, there should have been proactive marketing from both Xara and Magix on this, targeting Muse users. Maybe they were too busy with Xara Cloud.

However, something was done, but maybe with not enough hype. Magix put up several software products on Humble Bundle. This created a lot of noise, as for 20$, you could get both Xara P&GD and XWDP, along with PhotoStory Deluxe plus its Bonus Content, Vegas Pro Edit 14, Video Sound Cleaning Lab and Vintage Effects Suite. The update service for both Xara products would last until October. I don't know how many people took advantage of this, but there were a lot (I vaguely recall the counter being around the 100k mark). I gave away P&GD to a friend, PhotoStory to another, but no friends wanted WDP. Word of the Humble Bundle offerings was passed around on many forums, but I don't know about web design forums. This should have been done, if not directly by Xara/Magix, but indirectly by us users supporting our favourite programs. It would be interesting to see how many new Xara users this brought in.

Another story, early this year, a popular Digital Audio Workstation program, SONAR, was dropped by Gibson. Magix, probably knowingly, put a big discount on Samplitude Pro X3 Suite, put out the word, but it was mostly users posting about the discount on forums popular with SONAR users. The result was a huge gain in Samplitude users. There was a new sticky thread on the Samplitude forum welcoming new users and asking them to indicate from where they came. There were many, many posts in just a couple of months and almost all new users came from Sonar. Still, users complain about the lack of marketing and market penetration of Magix Samplitude, and rightly so. However, I have noticed a much more concentrated and coordinated marketing effort by Magix over the last year. But, they do have to watch out for opportunities, like the one with Muse, and take advantage of them.

I have raised one marketing issue with both Magix and Xara concerning Xara, and that is the integration of Xara P&GD and DPX with the Magix video editors. Many users of video programs want to be able to draw on the video, add their own overlays including drawings, graphics and annotations, and masks, both static and animated. All it takes is having one of these Xara programs installed. Xara is integrated with the video editors, but Magix and Xara have not been promoting this feature. They should.