As I see it, Finale has created a climate of resistance to their
upgrades. The bugs are one factor, but for me, the much bigger factor
is the lack of file-level compatibility across releases. 100 bucks for
an upgrade is not much of an issue for me, even if the feature set were
marginal. The real issue for me is that every time I upgrade, I
separate myself from other Finale users who might be collaborators on a
project here and there.
I don't know if Sibelius is any better in that regard. But considering
that I don't know of any product that makes its file formats obsolete
every year, I'm betting that this is not a problem with Sibelius.
The obvious solution is to program each release such that it can read
future files but simply ignore any elements it doesn't recognize. If
Finale worked this way, I would automatically purchase every upgrade.
dhbailey wrote:
As a member of the Sibelius group at yahoogroups, I have to say that
there I don't recall there being anybody who complains about the
upgrade schedule. And while there are those who don't upgrade due to
financial restrictions, I've never read that people aren't upgrading
because they want to wait to see how the new features work and whether
they really work at all, and never has anybody posted that they're
skipping an upgrade because the improvements and additions in any
single Sib upgrade aren't worth it. At least that I recall.
One thing that Finale has done is to create a gun-shy user base, at
least as indicated on this group. Many people don't jump on Finale
upgrades the way they used to because of the horrible bugs which have
been prevalent in the initial releases of the past several annual
Finale upgrades. How many messages on this group have been of the
"I'll wait until they bring out the Fin200Xa patch" which can't be
helpful to the financial engine of the company. I wonder how many
people hold off waiting for the first update patch to the upgrade
(what a stupid thing that a company's user base has to wait for such a
thing to feel comfortable with a new version) only to find that when
the update patch is released the early-adopters aren't raving about
how much got fixed. There must be many people who waited for the
update patch and then waited an additional period for the "b" patch
(not there always is one) or simply decide they were smart not to fall
for that upgrade and simply wait for the next full version upgrade
hoping the major bugs introduced in the current version manage to get
fixed in the next full version upgrade?
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