Cycling '74, the manufacturer of Max graphical programming environment, officially announced that it was acquired by Ableton. It is reported that the companies will continue to work independently, but will collaborate more efficiently.

MAX/MSP has been popular among users for almost 20 years as a quality programming environment for MIDI, audio, video applications and utilities, it's one of the most widely used music platforms.

Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles and David Zicarelli of Cycling '74 have commented on their decision in a big interview sharing with us their plans and thoughts about readiness for new challenges concerning the integration of unconventional computing platforms for Max and Ableton.

Both companies have been cooperating for a long time – they experienced working together in the late 1990s. Supervised by competent leaders, the companies went through many stages of development.

“We would have opportunities of making the experience of using Max and Live together more integrated, that we’ve resisted because we were independent organizations,” Zicarelli says.

He admitted that although Cycling ‘74 accepts long-term obligations to improve the work with technology, organizations do operate in a different manner. It’s not a secret that Cycling '74 employees work remotely from home in any part of the world, and the major part of the Ableton crew work in the office in Berlin.

Considering this fact it was decided that the companies would continue working independently, with no need to make changes in the staff of employees and in the way they work.

The leaders of the merged companies are optimistic about the future and they feel motivated with an increase in the number of mobile devices and the revival of hardware music creating.

David Zicarelli also admitted that since the technology development is a never-ending process, the organizations which were brought together should possess all the information on computing devices that people use to create music, provided the market is changing radically.

“What’s clear and obvious is that we both come from desktop background, and we realize that the world is much more multi-faceted now,” added Gerhard Behles.