On 1 Nov 2007 at 4:44, dhbailey wrote: > It's quite possible to be successful at it -- it costs money, certainly, > but it's something auto makers do all the time. They keep on bringing > out annual "upgrades" to existing models until a whole new model is > finally ready to present to the public, then they present the new model > and decide either to make it an addition to their offerings or to remove > an existing model which isn't doing very well and put this new model > line in its place.
Well, as a software developer, I have to say that it just doesn't work the same way. And, I think you are overrating the degree to which any new automobile model is completely new -- it's not. The changes are usually incremental, based on engineering practices that have been in place for a very long time. Eventually, after 10 years of incremental changes, you might have an automobile that no longer retains any design characteristics that were present 10 years before, but it never happens the way you describe it. And there are good reasons for that and those reasons are not so very different from software. When automakers *really* want to launch completely new models, they create a completely new brand, such as GM did with Saturn. All that said, I really do understand Jari's point. I've said for years that the data storage format is the single largest factor holding back the evolution of Finale. It was the same way with WordPerfect (whose data format was sequential instead of pointer- based) -- the data format can greatly limit the capabilities of the program running on top of it. What Jari is calling for (as I understand it) is a completely different approach to the storage of the music data such that the inputting of the notation is free of the limitations that come from that data model. I don't see it happening any time soon, certainly not by MakeMusic or Sibelius, and I don't know who would do it otherwise. -- 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
