David, I generally agree with your comments on this subject. But I really don't think this is a Wall Street play in this instance. I think it is a case where Finale as an independent company could not find a business model that worked consistently.
It seems to me that this SHOULD have worked. There are a lot of people who have minimal notation requirements, and they have always dabbled at the fringes (Rhapsody, Encore, etc) For them, MuseScore is probably adequate. So that does take a lot of buyers out of the potential market. I would have thought the two biggest segments are churches (choir directors) and schools/universities. Evidently neither Sibelius nor Finale was able to present a proposition to these segments that brought in enough revenue to fund continued support and development. I would argue this is because they spread their efforts too thin and brought relatively little value to the market over the past 10 years. There is always a debate about "what might have been." That leaves the hard core users, who are professional or at least semi-professional copyists, songwriters, arrangers, show producers, sound track writers and so on. Unfortunately this may be just too small a market to work. We are loyal of necessity, mainly because there is no other alternative. But it seems clear enough that Peaksware is interested only in milking the cash cow. Had they the slightest interest in returning the product to a leading position, they would have presented some kind of vision to the market by now. The good news, if there is any to be found, is that there is a very important segment that was overlooked by both Finale and Sibelius. This is writers and producers who work primarily in the DAW space. That is a rapidly growing market. Their compositional workflow is quite different from the typical Finale workflow. They compose intuitively and interactively. But some of them have a need for notation. It is just that notation is toward the end of their work flow whereas it is the beginning of the average Finale user's workflow. And I believe that is the reason Steinberg has been willing to make a much bigger investment than Makemusic and Avid combined in the past 2 years. My prediction is that we will never see another significant notation release (patches or new features) from Peaksware, although they are likely to push Smartmusic along. If we do see a significant new release from Peaksware, I bet it will be within 9 months of the commercial introduction of the Steinberg product. On 10/14/2014 2:57 PM, David H. Bailey wrote: > But that won't ever happen again in our lifetimes, not as long as Wall > Street is king and the consumer is only a peasant with very little power. > > _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu https://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale To unsubscribe from finale send a message to: finale-unsubscr...@shsu.edu
