David, what would you say about Photoshop, which has gobs of plugins from all kind of sources? That it was piss-poor programming on Adobe's part? Are you kidding me?
Could it possibly be said that to provide for plug-ins is an innovative and provisionary thing, even enabling entreprenurialism on the part of others? Certainly it could. After all, if you wish to learn how to do it, YOU can write a Finale plugin for your very own self, with you being the only one who knows about it uses it, giving you, presumably, some iota of a competitive advantage over fellow engravers. Or perhaps you would say to yourself that others could use that same functionality and might be willing to pay for it, thus reimbursing you a bit for time you didn't spend engraving and at the same time winning points of appreciation from the Finale brethren. The point is, it's *YOUR* choice, but a choice made possible by something that was *MakeMusic's* choice (to build in the functionality). Your argument seems to pivot around the phrase "...those features which should be part of the program." That's always subjective, becoming objective only when enough users agree with you. I believe that MM has been fairly responsible to respond to broadly supported feature or functionality requests. The expense at the corporate level to build in a feature that Joe Schmoe needs and earnestly believes (but without empirical evidence) "everybody" needs can't be justified. But that's not necessarily the case with talented individuals, working for themselves in some cases (AND, I might add, being people who have a lot at stake as regards actually using Finale commercially). I don't write the things, but still have to seriously doubt that most of the third-party plug-ins were written even though the writer couldn't think of a good reason to have them. So they are born out of a practical and useful understanding of real needs. I think it's a good system, NOT evidence of some diabolical escapement of responsibility. Richard > From: "David H. Bailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Which removed a huge financial burden and crush of user-complaints. > > Ain't it great when a developer off-loads development tasks and then > makes us glad?!? > > Reminds me a lot of Tom Sawyer and that danged picket fence! > > They did NOT, however, lower the price of Finale to compensate for us > having to spend extra to get those features which should be part of the > program, now, did they? > > Ain't the computer marketplace just grand? > > I can see economics and marketing classes three centuries from now: > [/sarcasm mode on] > Here is how the free marketplace worked, and you can clearly see the > supply/demand interplay, and how the companies that survived were the > ones with the best products that worked properly and offered all that > the customer wanted at a price they wanted to pay. > > Now on this side, we see the computer/software marketplace at the same > point in history. Pay particular attention to how sometimes the > supply/demand interplay worked, but only with hardware. With software, > it didn't seem to matter how many people bought Microsoft Office Suite, > that little old price never seemed to waggle a bit, did it? And > interestingly enough, people who had already paid the original price and > then every year paid another hefty amount of money were actually GLAD > when the whole plug-in architecture was introduced, so now they could > pay for the abilty to do their OWN programming, wasn't that nice. Or, > they could purchase plug-ins from nice users who also, by the way, had > become competent programmers themselves. So the manufacturers didn't > have to worry about making the software live up to the users' > expectations, they could simply shoot a new version out the door, with > only the barest of new features, enough to get most users to buy it, > knowing that the plug-in writers would get all the really important > functions worked out. > > It ended up that all that was left of the development team were the > marketers -- they'd preannounce new features that weren't included, but > the new version's PDK would have all the right hooks so the plug-in > writers could write the plug-ins to implement the new features. All the > programmers were fired and became plug-in writers. > [/sarcasm mode off] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
