In response to my comment,
Then there's the question of other revenue streams from the same
product. Both S~ and Finale bring in money from the flagship product,
but in addition to this, MakeMusic has the additional revenue from the
other members of the family, for which S~ does not have analogous
products.
Christopher Smith wrote:
Not exactly true. Our school uses their Auralia ear training software,
which is quite good for basic training (except for jazz rhythms). I
can recommend it for music schools. I think they have other things out
there, but I am not familiar with them.
But I would note that it wasn't the Auralia ear training software I was
thinking about in referring to "other members of the [software] family,
but rather Finale Notepad, Finale Songwriter, Finale Printmusic and
Finale Allegro. Since I haven't the data necessary to hold an informed
opinion I am willing to concede that S~'s educational version may be
analogous to Allegro, but as nearly as I can tell, S~ has no analogue to
the other three:
.
Dennis responded to my comments by writing:
The low price being offered only for the "competitive upgrade", I
don't see what there is to wonder about. Sibelius is simply trying to
attract new users, mainly Finale users, obviously.
To which I would note that I understand the "why" of the competitive
upgrade. I just not sure that there is not more to the story. It's
pretty much standard practice in marketing production software that one
offers a special price to existing users to upgrade to a later version,
and that one offers the upgrade price to users who can prove that they
use substantially equivalent products. As far as I know, it is _not_
standard practice to offer to sell your product to user's of competitive
products at half the price you sell the product to your own user base. I
can't speak for any current S~ users, but for my part, finding out that
MakeMusic had such an offer like that for S~ users would irritate me
mightily.
My comment that MakeMusic had dropped support for Plug-in development
may be too strong. I'm basing this on my memory of what Robert Patterson
wrote to the list about a year or two ago, and may well be overstating
the case, as I wrote the comment without researching it before I did so.
In preparing this rebuttal, I did a search of the download section of
Finale's website, and found that the latest Plug-in development kit
available is for FIN 2K. My working hypothesis is that S~ used the PDK
to learn about internal architecture of Finale early on, and that as a
consequence, MakeMusic and it's predecessors reduced the emphasis on
plug-ins shifting to Finale scripts, and dropping support for the ETF
format.
To conclude my clarifications and rebuttals, in response again to
Christopher Smith's comment
For all we know, Finale is going to come roaring out of the gates in
2009 with its best product yet, which it has been working on for
years. But they play such a close hand that we never know what is up
next.
My perception of Finale is as a series of "subsystems" [My term, not
theirs, as far as I know], of which I posit there are several: "-mover",
"input", "data management", "shape", "text", &c. My perception has
further been that MakeMusic has been dramatically recasting Finale
subsystem by subsystem. After the work to support the new MAC OS, then
the mover subsystem was significantly upgraded, then the input
subsystem. I see linked parts and the work that was done on
articulations as a manifestation of work on the "data management"
subsystem, and I expect that at the moment that either the shape
subsystem (which I consider including the shape designer, smart shapes,
and the shape part of the expression and articulation tools) or the text
subsystem, (which I consider including lyrics, text blocks, and the the
text part of the expression and articulation tools) are going to be the
area of work in the next couple of upgrades.
I wonder how many first time buyers in the UK are buying Finale in
preference to S~? Go to <http://www.musicroom.com/software.html>, select
the "software" tab, and look at the list of the top 10 bestsellers. Then
do a search for Sibelius, and check out the new user, non-educational
price in the UK, and compare it with the price for the same user for
Finale.
What does this say about which, if either, is more likely the sinking ship?
ns
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