On 17 Oct 2009 at 6:44, dhbailey wrote: > In effect, > we end-users have become the final beta-testers, for which > privilege we pay full retail upgrade prices.
Only those who choose to buy the initial release end up as de facto beta testers. Others wait to buy a new version until after the patch is released. > MakeMusic > waits a bit to see which of the known bugs raise the largest > outrage and complaints and then it fixes those and chooses > to let the rest of the known bugs lie until it can get > around to them. You do not know this to be the case. Stating it as fact is really a dishonest thing to do. And you probably don't even believe that this is the case. Software is complicated and fixing bugs is difficult and fraught with all sorts of risks and trade-offs. I've tried to explain this any time the issue comes up. Unless you the people at MM are crooks (which I don't think you believe), they are just doing the best they can with limited resources. The only software that lacks bugs is software that hasn't been released. Shipping is more important than stamping out 100% of known bugs. And no software company ships bug-free code. The only difference between various companies is what level and what quantity of bugs they tolerate in their shipping product. Because Finale's developers are yoked to the treadmill of yearly releases, they have to tolerate more bugs than if they had a more leisurely schedule, since otherwise they'd run out of revenues to pay the employees. I wish they could figure out a way to get off that treadmill, but I just don't see how it's possible for them to do it. Apple can afford to use an entire development cycle for bug fixes and performance improvements in their flagship OS because they have plenty of other revenue streams as larger or larger than what they get from sales of OS X -- they can afford to lose the revenue on the reduced-price Snow Leopard because they have plenty of other cash coming in. MM doesn't have but the one other major revenue stream, and I don't think it's as large as the Finale revenue stream. Sibelius may have shown the way on this when they were acquired by Avid -- it puts the Sibelius development within a larger company with other significant revenue streams that can subsidize major investments in Sibelius should a maintenance release (like Snow Leopard) become necessary (though Sibelius has already done a better job on this with releases ever 2 or 3 years -- they never got on the yearly-release treadmill, so they don't have to get off it). To me, the only solution for MM is to be acquired by a larger company that is willing to invest in Finale's long-term development. But I haven't a clue what companies might want to take on that investment given the big picture with 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
