On 10/3/2009 12:38 AM, Michael Greensill wrote:
Now I know I don't have to upgrade every time but they always reel you in with something that can't have taken much effort to program, like chord symbols being attached to beats in 2010. But should they charge $100 for that feature. And half the time we're paying the $100 to have fixes to things that were the programmers fault in the first place.
I know I posted an anti-Makemusic sentiment earlier in the thread, but now I'm going to support the other side.
First of all, as has been pointed out here many times, we have no way of knowing what is easy or hard to implement for the Finale programmers. Some of us on this list do some programming, and may have a slightly better idea than most, but even so, you can't make this sort of assessment without knowing the program in question. And the particular example you gave (chord symbols attached to beats) is almost certainly *not* something easy to do.
Second, I always look at these things in terms of my time. There have been several Finale upgrades which added seemingly minor things, hardly worth the price of upgrading. But my bottom line question is, Will these minor features save me enough time to justify the upgrade price? For most of us, if the new features in the upgrade save us more than 2 or 3 hours over the course of the year, the answer is probably yes. A good case in point is the ability to optimize in groups. My recollection is that the year that was introduced, there wasn't much else in the upgrade that interested me, but that one feature saved me several hours of work and made the upgrade worth it.
Having said all of that, I'll flip-flop again. I think I wouldn't mind all of this so much if Makemusic just came out and said that they're switching to a subscription model. I'm not crazy about subscription models, but it's a more honest description of MM's business practices, and somehow I don't think I'd grumble so much about shelling out that $100 each year.
Aaron. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
