Daniel Wolf wrote:
Trying to figure out the future of Finale -- and MakeMusic's plans for
the product -- without any concrete internal information is more like
reading tea leaves than serious analysis, but the tea leaves we've
been left appear to me to be gathering in an inauspicious pattern.
...<snippage>...
Today (the first of December 2007), I received another tea leaf: for
the first time, a bit of advertisement for Finale 2008 from the Finale
dealer here in Germany.
Compared to my past experience with Finale, this is actually quite early
for an advertisement of FIN 2008! My experience (as a U.S. domiciled
user, who has dealt direct with Coda / Net4Music / MakeMusic! since 2k1,
the first upgrade I purchased) is that the earliest advertisements for
the product are generally released in May.
While not widely publicized, and not noted by many on this list (except
perhaps me), MakeMusic! / Finale have scored won some significant points
over Sibelius in the past fifteen months or so. It was about a year that
it was announced that where Hal Leonard's popular music site, SheetMusic
Direct used S~'s Scorch, that the new companion sites, Choir Music
Direct, Band Music Direct, and Orchestra Music Direct, were being
launched with a re-vitalized Finale Viewer, instead of Scorch. This is
significant, as while it used to be possible to do work in Finale and
import it to S~, it was never possible to do it the other way, as S~'s
data file formats were proprietary. This means that Hal Leonard is
switching (at least for products available through the web sites) to
Finale from Sibelius. This did not happen overnight, and I suspect that
we now know where the money needed to develop linked parts came from.
I haven't done exhaustive searches, and I don't know how many other
sites out there are using FinaleViewer in preference to Sibelius. I
would also note that current financial environment is giving some boost
to Finale over Sibelius. Last time I checked on-line prices for Finale
on European sites, it was selling for a lower price in Europe than
Sibelius. Since then, the exchange rate has moved so that Finale has an
even greater price advantage.
One thing is telling for me: S~ found it expedient to offer to give a
very large discount recently to a significant subset of people as
"competitive upgrades". It is interesting to me that I was not able
(despite a casual search) to find any similar upgrade offer to Sibelius
users from MakeMusic!. Might it be that S~ found the need, and MM did not?
ns
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