Well, I'd say that NI hardware was at one point the best you could get in terms of performance and ease of use, if you had tons of money. Quick prototypability

Well, I'd say that NI hardware was at one point the best you could get in terms of performance and ease of use, if you had tons of money. Quick prototypability is the main advantage compared to everything else. I'm not sure who I would use for that purpose, I'd say that we're blessed with a huge variety of things which are of quite good enough performance and ease of use, but also with the curse of needing to deal with different vendors for different kinds of uses. I wouldn't expect most companies that sell general purpose DAQs to also sell FPGA systems for signal processing, for instance. That's odd. But if you just mean digital and analog inputs and outputs there are so many options now that are adequate, even just an eval board for a microcontroller running a LabView firmware module can do well enough (and this route lets you escape NI better later anyway). This is a kind of cool new thing, using an Arduino or whatever as if it were an NI DAQ. So the ecosystem is much larger, and less locked into NI software (LabView anyway). On the other end where reliability is important, I wouldn't trust many places, but I barely trust NI. Honestly I'd be looking at Emerson if I wanted that level of assurance, but I wouldn't use that for prototyping. In a prototype I have to design it to fail safely enough rather than trying to make it foolproof. So for prototyping there's a ton of options now, and once the prototyping is done -- if it needs to be high reliability then it's probably going Emerson or something similarly expensive anyway, and if it needs to be low cost then you'll just put it on an embedded DAC and ADC with a ARM-M0 or RISC-V or Raspberry Pi or whatever you fancy. And if you want it to be more expensive but more reliable you buy some kind of OEM module you put on your PCB so that they can be more carefully integrated while using certified analog input and output modules. I think that ends up being three widely varying use cases, and prototyping is maybe just too easy to do in other non-LabView and non-NI-hardware systems such that the high-reliability Emerson-style market is what remains. I won't miss LabView, that's for sure.