"the Virus TI2 will be there for a while. we believe it is a great sounding musical instrument which will not be replaced anytime soon."
It is a great sounding musical instrument. It continues to sell well because if you manage to get it working properly - 'cause it's certainly not a given, regardless of how it's named and publicized - it's a plus for any studio. But the thing that keeps the sales running, I think, is the fact that it's great for gigs. That says a lot about it's build quality and reliability on stage and the sheers number of options for synthesis. I think this explains a lot.
But if they think they can rest because of their success with this, I'd suggest otherwise. They would do well to revamp the engine with further improvements, most of them have been mentioned here "ad-nauseum" and it's not a coincidence most users point in the same directions when talking about what they'd like to see on an instrument.
Access has made a lot: they've managed to create a synthesizer that's deep enough to make most of the sounds you'd find on instruments that existed before it, managed to build an expiring physical interface extremely well built. This is what makes it so great to use Live, 'cause you can dispense a huge rack of instruments when you can reproduce most of them with the Virus. On the studio, the depth of options is/was a major appeal, along with the number of voices on offer. But the Ti part of things didn't go exactly smooth, and it should. It's a great idea that's worth fighting for: a sound designer's dream, and today this means enlarging the scope of options for sure, when you have stuff like Zebra and Massive as competition (regardless of them not being hardware), a DSP based bread-and-butter synthesizer that offers sample accurate timing (please, whenever it's ready, give me a call) and automation within a DAW, powerful enough that you can have 16 sounds of it going at once (please, contact me when it's ready) without charging the host's cpu, storing patches on projects, librarian for patches, so forth and so on.
Then being able to perform with it live is a great plus as well, if this integration is made flawless the better if you can recall settings/patches right away and tweak away live, either really playing it or simply tweaking knobs.
So there you have it: the engine, the integration + dsp power (to live up to expectations created and publicized by the company), the performance side. plenty of work to do, me thinks
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