I think this list is being entirely too pessimistic about prospects for future Finale releases. I should let someone like Michael Good speak for himself (or for Peaksware) but I believe some key developers from Finale are making the move. That hardly seems like they are abandoning Finale.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: don't even begin to count on the Steinberg release until there is an announced release date and feature set. Bringing software to market faces many challenges that have nothing to do with the quality of the tech team developing it. One the Steinberg product faces is that it pretty much has to address every use case of Finale and Sibelius that those two have evolved over twenty years. Yes, it will potentially do some new innovative thing incredibly well, but v1.0 will almost certainly fail at some other critical tasks that Fin/Sib handle with aplomb, and that failure could be the deal breaker that kills the product. (This is an oft-repeated tale in this industry.) I agree with the comments about MuseScore. I also think you will see MuseScore progressively steal away higher and higher level users over time. MuseScore is a rapidly moving target with a major upgrade imminent. On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Craig Parmerlee <cr...@parmerlee.com> wrote: > 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 > _______________________________________________ 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
