On 22 Aug 2004 at 15:02, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > And how to get people to buy annual upgrades? > > Feature creep.
Feature creep is justified when the product is finished and bug-free and has no components in need of redesign or fundamental re- engineering. Coda could get upgrade revenue by providing real improvements to the software in the form of significantly improving existing components of the software. That seems to me to be the purpose of the enhanced tuplets, to improve something that already exists to make it work better. That kind of improvement is worth paying for, and is by no means "feature creep." It seems that this upgrade has two few of those substantive improvements, and, as with 2K4, I'll certainly be skipping it (I have 2K3). I did use 2K4 on a Mac while in California (to do a quick and dirty transposition -- I had one hour to do it, and got it done, in part because of the new automatic word extensions; I may have quibbles with the exact way it came out, but given the very limited time I had to input it under and unfamiliar environment, I was thrilled with the automatic word extensions), and it was pretty usable. But it doesn't offer me enough (even taken together with 2K5's new features) to justify the upgrade dollars for my use of it. I still think Finale is riddled with too many cases of "leaky abstractions", where the underlying plumbing shows through into the user interface layer (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html), and it doesn't seem to me that Coda is doing too much to remedy these. I'm sure they know they are there, probably moreso than all of us, but it's quite hard to completely engineer working subsystems without breaking all sorts of things. The choice for the software company is of marginally improving the product through re-engineering, but at the same time risking proliferating bugs in all sorts of places. The improvement has to be fairly large to justify the bug risk, and, apparently, Coda has decided that in a lot of these cases, the benefits are not presently enough to justify the bug risk. I can understand that. But it's not a sign of a growing and improving product. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
