dhbailey wrote:
There's certainly the fully-functioning non-saving demo available for download. Far more impressive than having people download Finale Notepad and assume it's representative of Finale.
Finale doesn't need extra attractiveness -- out of the box, with simple entry turned on by default (the way it installs on my machine) it works as easily as Sibelius does. MakeMusic needs their woefully inadequate publicity and marketing departments to get off their duffs and put Finale in all those schools which either have no software or are using Sibelius. And I don't mean by touting non-features like MicNotator and Scanning capabilities.
I wouldn't be surprised to find (although I can't prove this and it is purely conjecture) that Sibelius is offering better deals to school labs, and I also wouldn't be surprised to find that Sibelius is sending free copies to undecided music teachers who are in charge of school labs, just to win the contract.
Heck, what does it actually cost MakeMusic to produce one installation disk of Finale? 50-cents? A dollar? They should be giving it away by the bucketfulls to schools, even to the point of sending around clinicians (I'm available Makemusic, are you listening?)
I'm available, too! :D
Free enterprise and marketing are valuable tools, MakeMusic. You should start using them! Think of the tax write-off (at $99 per copy or whatever) the company could take if they gave away 10,000 free copies. And even if only half of them resulted in the purchase of the annual upgrade, that would wipe out the company's 2nd quarter loss right there! But with the $990,000 deduction for promotional costs, they could show a bigger loss and pay less taxes, all the while effectively wiping out the loss in their cash flow.
Interestingly, Finale actually cheaper for academic purchases: A UK 10-user site licence is �700 ex VAT, compared to �1149 for Sibelius.
Additional point on note: A thoroughly unstatistical random selection of UK university music departments websites turns up 4 touting Sibelius being available on their computers, 2 with both Finale and Sibelius, and none with just Finale.
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