On 14 Oct 2006 at 6:13, dhbailey wrote: > 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
Wasn't SmartMusic developed by the same team responsible for Finale? > -- MakeMusic looks on Smartmusic as the big money-earner, not Finale. Sure, the razor blade model. But MM has made SmartMusic and Finale work together, so the existence of SmartMusic increases the market for Finale (i.e., if you want to create SM accompaniments, Finale provides you the tools, no?). > 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. Yep, that's true, but that may have more to do with the fact that Finale was already a mature product when Sibelius was introduced. And nobody seems to ever criticize Sibelius for matching Finale features (GPO anyone?). > 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. But it's *good* that MM is diversified, and in a way that increases revenues and gets new buyers for Finale. > 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. And given recent discussion on this list, this would be a *bad* thing? Wouldn't a sequencer with Sibelius-quality notational output be a Finale killer? > 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. I think these companies are too small to predict what will happen. -- 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
