Owain Sutton wrote:
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.
[snip]
True enough about the demo, but you can't really find out the capabilities of a program unless you can work for a while, save your work, think for a while, come back and continue to work on what you've saved. Non-saving demos are worse than useless in my mind.
The other negative factor against assuming that the demo will help marketing is that it forces the user to actively search it out, download it, try it, get frustrated with the inability to save and yet despite that expect them to buy it.
That only works for people who are already fairly well convinced that Finale is what they want to begin with. Hardly active marketing, in my opinion.
Your statistics on notation software use in U.K. schools is very telling, especially in light of your listing the 10-user site license fees! Somebody's doing a poor job of marketing and it isn't Sibelius!
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
