Johannes Gebauer wrote: > I very much doubt that this will make any difference to Finale > sales, though.
This is the point that burns me up. Finale 2003 was a terrible upgrade--perhaps the most useless we've ever seen. So it sold really badly. So some marketing genius decided this must be because users were copying it instead of buying it. So Finale 2004 had c.p. Now we get certainly the best upgrade since Finale 2000. It's gonna sell like wildfire, c.p. or no c.p. But the marketing genius who thought up c.p. is now gonna say how brilliant he was to add the c.p. Sheesh. I wish I could bring myself to be as sanguine about the future as Tobias and some others are. I certainly trust the current bunch at MM as much as he does. But no amount of putative legal protections could preserve us against bankruptcy or corporate death. Furthermore, I am deeply skeptical that the legal protections even exist, at least as they have been purported to. I imagine that corporate bankruptcies, mergers, and/or buyouts can be arranged so that all prior obligations to customers are simply wiped away. E.g., would it not be possible for, say, Sibelius to buy the rights to Finale source code w/o assuming any obligations to MM's customers? Then when MM died--and I can only imagine the latter in conjunction w/ the former--Sibelius would owe nobody nothin'. A real-life example of this is the possible buyout of Peoplesoft by Oracle. If this happens, most Peoplesoft customers assume they will be forced to switch to Oracle's competing product. I should mention that the animosity between Peoplesoft and Oracle is probably more virulent than that between Sib and Fin, so these what-if's are more than mere smoke blowing. And Johannes is very right about the level of commitment required from us. If we switch to Fin04, *we can't go back*!!! So, if (no, *when* because nothing is forever) MM sings its swan song, we will be fully committed with no fallback. And if this happens to be 12 months from now we'll all be screwed. But both Tobias and I can be somewhat cheerful about it, because in that hopefully unlikely scenario, either one or both of us could fairly easily write a program to downgrade the files. :-) -- Robert Patterson http://RobertGPatterson.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
