On 5 Oct 2006 at 21:52, John T Sylvanis wrote: > Microsoft was first to offer the Office suite > and that's why WordPerfect and their suite don't have market share. > They lagged behind Microsoft for years as far as integration.
WordPerfect made many, many mistakes. They died with the transition to Windows, which they simply didn't understand. Their first try was late, and their next try was buggy. It was not until their 3rd try that they got a decent Windows version, and by that time MS had already started to pick up market share because of bundling. But Word was also as good as or better than WP (not for all users, but for many). For a product to overcome the "installed out of the box" syndrome, it has to be unquestionably superior. WordPerfect was not. And then the company went into a death spiral, being sold off to various companies several times, which did not help confidence in their long-term viability. The key event that allowed MS an opportunity was that WP failed to transition smoothly from DOS to Windows. That gave an interval of two to three years for MS to change its marketing to give Word the lock it has on the market today. > But > Microsoft MUST fasten the pace of their OS development because LINUX > is charging ahead. Windows 2000 was just as delayed as Vista, and Linux didn't take over then. Linux can never take over the market for desktops in the same way MS took over WordPerfect's market, because Linux is not a company. There is no single Linux. This means adopting Linux brings with it additional administrative cost and additional training costs. It's never going to happen unless there's a major event in the IT world that presents a new paradigm (like the switch to Windows for WordPerfect) and that MS then fails to adapt. The Internet might have been such a shift, but MS seems to have survived that one (it was pretty much irrelevant to their business at the time, seems to me, and they took the opportunity to expand into other businesses). But it's not going to happen with the current balances of causes and effects within the IT world. Finale's competition is Sibelius, and stiff competition it is. I expect Finale to lose this battle, because Sibelius has the mind- share of new users, partly justifiably, but partly unfairly (because many people still criticize Finale for shortcomings it has not had for nearly a decade). While MM seems to be doing a better job of responding to innovations in Sibelius with its initial implementation of linked parts, Finale's featureset is still being driven reactively, seems to me. Playing catch-up will keep Finale's current user base, sure, and Finale's versions may be better than Sibelius's (Human Playback and GPO seem to be areas in which Finale has done it better), but that doesn't get the new users. I don't know how MM gets out of the death spiral of simply reacting to innovations in Sibelius. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
