David W. Fenton wrote:
[snip]
Why is it that everyone assumes the purchase of Sibelius by another
company means that Sibelius will be weakened? Isn't there a certain
synergy involved there? Why would a company purchase Sibelius and
then kill it off?
[snip]
I don't think it's so much a matter of the company intentionally killing
Sibelius off, but more a matter of people in charge who haven't got a clue.
As more layers of management get added at the top, local control gets
lost. As overall corporate focus shifts, development dollars get moved
from one department to another. Look at Finale and Smartmusic --
MakeMusic looks on Smartmusic as the big money-earner, not Finale. And
Finale hasn't innovated anything other than the inclusion of GPO since
it introduced Staff Styles (something Sibelius still hasn't come up
with) -- all the rest of the improvements to Finale have come in
response to Sibelius improvements. When MakeMusic was THE product of a
company called Coda, it was the main focus and got all the development
dollars. No longer. The same may well happen with Sibelius.
The new owners may begin to look at how they can combine Sibelius into
their other products, rather than allow it to follow its own, so far
very successful, development path. Rather than allow Sibelius to
develop the next great new feature which will send Finale's developers
racing for the antacids and starting to put in longer hours, the
Sibelius developers may be forced to figure out how to make Sibelius be
the notation module for a sequencer, and concentrate the development
dollars not on more elegant notation (spacing algorithms,
hand-engraved-quality slurs and ties, ease of use, etc) but on
developing a better quantization routine so that even more noodlings of
know-nothing would-be-composers can be spewed forth in notation from a
computer, helping them gain some sort of recognition.
So whatever happens to Sibelius, it won't be an intentional killing off,
but just look at what's happened with Encore, which used to be actually
a major and very real competitor to Finale. If Encore ever regains any
market share it'll be a miracle. For the sake of Finale improvement
over the years, since it seems to improve only when kicked in the ass by
Sibelius, all of us Finale users need to pray that the same fate doesn't
await Sibelius.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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