On 1 Nov 2007 at 2:22, Kurt Gnos wrote: > Fix its old bugs, but better reprogram it from scratch, using new > technologies
This is a really terrible suggestion. If you think the bugs in Finale are bad now, wait 'til you see the new programmed-from-scratch Finale. Consider the case of Netscape, which chucked its entire codebase and started from scratch. The result was that for 5 years, there was no new Netscape browser, and the world moved on and Netscape lost its market share. Joel Spolsky explains why it's bad to chuck an existing codebase and start from scratch: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Quote: Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted. It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they? Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch. It was originally posted April 6, 2000. And y'all know how many more years it took after that before the Mozilla foundation produced a decent browser. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
