Robert Patterson wrote:
Meanwhile, I suspect Finale has a poor track record of stealing users from Sibelius. I do not say this because I think Sib is better or worse. I'm just reporting my personal impressions of fact.
I would submit that there are two additional reasons Sibelius did a better job of stealing customers form Coda / Net4Music / MakeMusic! than C/N/M did in stealing customers from Sibelius, besides the reasons Robert mentioned. First, while Sibelius offered a competitive discount to Finale owners, to my knowledge, C/N/M has never offered Sibelius users a competitive discount. Second, because of the openness of the ~.ETF format, it was trivial for Finale users to switch to Sibelius: save your Finale work as ~.ETF, and open it in Sibelius. However, sinc Sibelius has a closed data file format, and does not write the ~.ETF format, there was no good way to go backwards. And under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it is a crime in the U.S. to reverse engineer the data file format which is copyright and proprietary. There is also the issue of just how accurate Sibelius' claim of 10000 users switching from Finale to Sibelius really is. I would expect that it is true that 10000 users took advantage of the competitive upgrade; however, this was painless, as C/N/M keeps track of their own user base and ships out upgrades based upon its own records, there is no penalty to sending in the distribution CD (especially if you send in an older redundant version, or first burn a back-up copy). So there is no way to know how many of the claimed 10,000 users who Sibelius claims switched, actually use the program, and how many purchased the competitive upgrade, and still are using Finale instead, even newer versions. I would also note that in the various forums in which I participate, since the first of the year, I have seen by actual count, a dozen different users who wrote to the lists, saying that they had originally used Finale, had switched to Sibelius, been disenchanted, and had switched back to using Finale because of Sibelius' shortcomings.
I believe Finale's fundamental dilemma is manifest in their upgrades of late. They are diversifying Finale and integrating it with a suite of products, notably Smart Music.
I don't think one can overllook the impact of Smartmusic. As I understand it, Smartmusic files are MIDI files with proprietary extensions, and these extensions have not been published, which means that no one (e.g., Sibelius) can produce a smartmusic file without licensing the technology from MakeMusic!, and that they cannot reverse engineer the SmartMusic data format without themselves being in violation of the DMCA. Furthermore, I would expect that aspects of the SmartMusic extensions are also patented, and probably in such a way that Sibelius cannot develop a competing product for at least another decade, or decade and a half, without running the risk, of a patent infringement suit.
It occurs to me, too, that there is an aspect to some of these things that may affect certain items. I have not explored in any detail, the Sibelius software patents, and if there are any that relate to items like dynamic parts linking, or house styles, it may be that MakeMusic! may choose to ignore these items for the duration of the patent, rather than risk an expensive lawsuit in which they are charged with infringement.
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