On 7/31/2012 10:34 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote: > David, > > My understanding is that Sibelius won't be retaining the core group > of staff who have helped shape the software over the past 15 years. > Instead, Avid will be outsourcing continued development of Sibelius > to programmers in Eastern Europe, in a pure cost-cutting move. That > doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the future of the product. The > most important asset any piece of software has are the human beings > who helped develop it, and if those people aren't being retained, > then it's hard to see how the software will continue to move in a > positive direction. > [snip]
That is the big worry. However, consider the fact that the Finn Brothers, who initially developed Sibelius (it was entirely their brain-child originally), sold it and it continued to be a great product and even flourished after they left. Daniel Spreadbury started as the writer of manuals, yet he rose to prominence as the driving force behind the product. One can only hope that such an individual is in place in the development office Sibelius is being moved to. As I understand things, it's not that Avid is "outsourcing" development of Sibelius, but rather moving it to development offices they already have and are using for their other software, such as ProTools. So the picture isn't quite as bleak as if they were running an ad in the Croatian version of Craigslist to the effect of "people familiar with computer programming wanted part-time to work on software pertaining to a field in which they are unfamiliar." They're not just handing the development to people who are unfamiliar with music software. The ProTools team has already been working with Sibelius to incorporate some of its notation capabilities into ProTools. There are many pieces of software which have continued to evolve in a positive manner long after those with the initial vision have left -- how many Finale developers are the same as when the product started? Everybody in the Sibelius community is scared to death that this will be the death knell of the product. It might be, it might not be, only time will tell. WordPerfect is very far from the people who originated it (several iterations of ownership, actually) yet it remains a robust word processing environment which still hasn't failed me and has continued to grow and evolve despite being developed by people who originally were unfamiliar with the product. Somebody at Avid thinks that the developers in other development offices they have will be able to keep the development going -- Sibelius is one of their profit centers -- so we just have to hope that they are right. Daniel Spreadbury himself, sometime long before this crisis emerged, had said that a major part of a recent update (can't remember if it was Sib5 or Sib6) was programmed somewhere half-way around the world. Of course what happened to other musical products such as MasterTracksPro and Encore can certainly show the downside of corporate greed and neglect. So both Sibelius and Finale are poised on tiny points of hope and the balance could tip either way (the products continue to grow and mature or they wither and die). But both products remain sources of profit for their owners so I'm hoping they will tip to the side of continued growth and prosperity. And I also hope that disgruntled former developers at either/both Sibelius/Finale will put their programming skills to work to help MuseScore prosper or to bring out entirely new notation products to compete with their former bosses. In the meantime, my biggest fear remains that if either piece of software (Finale or Sibelius) is allowed to die, some mechanism is put in place for freeing us from on-line activation so that we can continue to move the software to new computers as long as the hardware and the operating system will allow the software to run. -- David H. Bailey [email protected] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
