John Howell wrote:
At 9:28 AM -0500 7/9/05, Robert Patterson wrote:
Isn't the fundamental problem here that the pie is not getting bigger?
Sibelius had the luxury of learning from Finale's mistakes. Its
original features list was a litany of Finale's (then) shortcomings.
Apparently its entire reason for existing and strategy for growth was
to be the answer to Finale's problems. I can't tell you how many Sib
users who have told me flat-out this was their reason for using
Sibelius: notably Sib's posterchild, John Rutter.
I ask this quite honestly because I don't know the answer. Was there
actually a situation of competition with Finale in the UK when Sibelius
was being developed? Or was it simply a case of parallel development?
As I recall, Sibelius was originally developed for a computer platform
only used in the UK--Acorn?--and thus had no possible market in the
U.S., while Finale had no version that could compete on that platform.
You may be completely correct if you're talking about what they did when
they were preparing their Windoze and Mac versions, bringing them
directly into competition with Finale, but it doesn't seem that the
original impetus to develop the program was direct competition.
You're accurate in your depiction, John. But the Acorn market was way
too small a market for the company to grow with and they needed to get
into the Windows and Mac markets, which is why they made the switch.
There are still complaints on the Sibelius list from long-time Sibelius
users, who were using the Acorn version concerning some things which
were possible on that version but aren't possible yet on the Win/Mac
version of Sibelius.
But it was obvious from the first Win/Mac version of Sibelius that they
were aiming at the disgruntled Finale user or those who had stayed away
in droves due to the hard learning curve of the early versions of
Finale. The Finn brothers actively marketed version 1 of Sibelius for
Win/Mac to such a user base. And it worked, it worked very well and
forced Finale to play catchup.
Other than Staff Styles, I can't think of any recent major upgrade to
Finale that hasn't seemed to be a response to Sibelius features.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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