Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:
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As usual, Dennis's long answer. The short answer on bargaining power: It's not too late. Skip all further upgrades. Tell them why. The minute they escrow a fail-safe mechanism is the minute I'll place my order. Anyone else?
And lose the improvements that make my income-generating work easier, faster, better? It really is a quandary, as far as I'm concerned. It's easy to skip upgrades which offer nothing more than eye-candy, but it's really hard to skip upgrades which offer major improvements in productivity.
It's also hard to skip upgrades when others with whom you work are upgrading -- since the earlier version can't work on files generated in a later version, how do you propose we solve that problem?
I think we all would love a version which is untethered, but in an industry where the catchphrase is "we don't have to care, we own the stuff you want to use" I truly can't see the bargaining power we have. MakeMusic is already generating the lion's share of its income from its SmartMusic product -- do you really think they care about us?
For an independent composer who can already do all that he/she wants in Finale 2003 (or whichever version was the one before the tethering came into being) resistance is easy -- there is no need to upgrade ever as long as your current version does all you'll ever need it to.
For those of us who serve others or who collaborate with others, the paying clients, it may not be that simple.
And don't suggest they go back to the "insert the original installation CD" anti-piracy concept -- they tried that back with Finale97 (or was it 98) and very quickly scrapped that idea over the hue and cry of complaints. And probably the expensive and time-consuming work on their part to ship out replacement original CDs when a licensed user had damaged their CD or the computer failed to recognize it.
I agree with the concept of a tethering-release mechanism being escrowed with some third-party, but whom would you suggest? Which companies/organizations can you predict will still be together and able to handle the situation when MakeMusic goes out of business? The whole problem with such escrows is that nobody can guarantee that ANY entity will be in existence at any future point so how would you suggest working around that potential problem?
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
