On 8 Jul 2005 at 16:07, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > When David W. Fenton writes: > > >I think they are going to have to abandon the yearly upgrades. I > >think it's a really bad business practice in the first place, because > > it places a schedule on development that is artificial -- a software > > development schedule should be determined by the goals of the > >projects currently on the table for implementation/revision/fixing. > > > >MakeMusic is also now in a situation where their yearly upgrade is > >coming out at an inoppportune time for schools -- releasing in August > > and September and October is not a very good time for that. If they > >took 18-20 months for their next release, > > and I personally doubt that the upgrade cycle is one that is completed > within a year. Rather, I'm guessing that the development cycle is 36 > or 48 months, and that a new cycle is started about every 12, so that > some group within MakeMusic! already is already working on what is > going to be in 2k9, that the list of what will be in 2k8 is already > pretty well fixed and design work is substantially completed, and that > the programming work on 2k7 is substantially completed, and with the > alpha testers.
I honestly don't think MakeMusic is big enough to run their development projects in that manner. It basically means running multiple codebases at the same time, and forking them before you've finished implementing the features in a previous version. No smart developer ever does that unless they are planning a major discontinuity in their code base, such as I'm sure Coda did when they switched to the Windows32 API in WinFin97. In that case, they probably had separate codebases running in parallel, as they still needed to be able to distribute both Win16 and Win32 versions (and, of course, the Win16 version of WinFin97 was the only way to get MIDI on Windows NT 4). And I'm sure the same thing happened with the OS X version of Finale. So, I strongly doubt that the codebase for anything beyond Finale 2007 is already begun. Yes, at this point, Finale 2006 is a closed codebase, because they've already announced the feature set, but I strongly doubt they would launch Finale 2008 at this point unless it was basically a new development project. Even big companies don't do that kind of thing absent a major code fork. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
