Sibeöis Protest

[sakari.lindhen]

Many of you know that Avid, Sibelius's owner, are downsizing, and sacking the Sibelius team in London.

There is now more information and a petition at: http://www.sibeliususers.org/

It would be nice to get Finale supporters onboard as well, as competition only improves both products!

thanks

sakari

[qccowboy]

here is the latest from Avid regarding Sibelius:

http://community.avid.com/blogs/avid...-sibelius.aspx

[sakari.lindhen]

Can the mods fix the title? This wireless keyboard and my dyslexia do not go well hand in hand, it misses letters or sends out streams of them, that I do not always notice...

[rbowser-]

When the structures of companies change, it usually sends out a ripple of concern to interested parties. In this case, Avid is making changes in how Sibelius business is conducted, and users are concerned that this will have a detrimental effect on the software's future.

While it's natural for users to speculate and worry, I feel that, as usual, there's virtually no actual information available that can definitely support the concern that Sibelius itself will suffer because of the changes. I feel the petition is prematurely instigated, and is based on nothing more than vague worries.

To have Avid's statement about Sibelius also posted on this thread was a good counter balance. Thanks for that,
qccowboy.

Sakari - It's unfortunate that we can't fix our subject lines when they come out wrong. It's also unfortunate that the moderators here, myself included, don't have the tools to fix those!

BUT - I want to assure you, I knew immediately that the thread was about Sibelius - I think anyone here can easily figure that out.

Randy

[sakari.lindhen]

There are two main fears with the closing of the London Office (and the fact that in the last year Avid's share price has gone from 65 to 6.5 dollars!).

1) the team, composed of people who are not only accomplished programmers but also educated musicians and engravers, provide much support on their forum for all the minutiae of notating and printing, not just technical issues. Both classical and contemporary music have rather obscure needs for correct notating.

2) if Sibelius is not kept updated, it might not run under future computer platforms (windows 9? Mac 'Cheetah'?) meaning you need to keep an old machine around for old projects (which i do, I have one machine with Overture on it,and one machine with Cubase VST on it. as well as the machine I am using now)...and when that machine goes to Silicon Heaven, you are out of luck.

3) added to this is of course the personal relationships we have build up on the forum with the team, precisely as people have done with Gary and the team on this forum, makes us concerned for the human factor as well.

Drats. I was hoping you could fix it..like my typos are regularly fixed on other boards. Now every time I check it, I am reminded that I can't proofread to save my life... as a translator, this is rather a problem. As is this keyboard which sometimes doesnt send out a letter I am pressing, and then makes up for it by outputting 50....

[rbowser-]

Thanks for your new message, Sakari. I'm sorry we can't correct subject line typos - You're right that almost everywhere else online, one can do that. It's very nice, for instance, to add "SOLVED!" to a subject line when a technical problem has been solved over the course of a thread. I've never understood why this Forum is programmed differently.

And thanks for the added detail about your Sibelius concerns. In the wake of business changes, speculation about the ramifications is inevitable, I understand.

Randy

[maiki]

(Hey, I was able to fix the title! ;-)

I certainly think there is real cause for concern.

It isn't just closing an office, a location. That office is where all the Sibelius programming is done, from what I understand. If they close it, that means no further development of Sibelius. It will become extinct, like Encore, etc.

Would that be good for Finale? No, not at all. Finale would not be nearly as good as it is today if not for the competition of Sibelius. It is competition that spurs product growth and improvement. An end to further versions of Sibelius would I think engender far fewer improvements in Finale in the future.

It is also of much concern, the proposed liquidation of MakeMusic by Launch Equities.

These products were created by musicians, who were also programmers, and tried to make good music products for their fellow musicians. (Of course they wanted to make a living at it too, but it wasn't only about money.) (Gary Garritan is a great example of that. A musican-programmer who clearly loved creating these libraries to share with his fellow musicians. Somehow I doubt that the CEO of "Launch Equities" has the same concern.) It is quite unfortunate to see them taken over by corporatists who could not care less about music, music software, music education, etc.

When the structures of companies change, it usually sends out a ripple of concern to interested parties. In this case, Avid is making changes in how Sibelius business is conducted, and users are concerned that this will have a detrimental effect on the software's future.

While it's natural for users to speculate and worry, I feel that, as usual, there's virtually no actual information available that can definitely support the concern that Sibelius itself will suffer because of the changes. I feel the petition is prematurely instigated, and is based on nothing more than vague worries.

To have Avid's statement about Sibelius also posted on this thread was a good counter balance. Thanks for that,
qccowboy.

Sakari - It's unfortunate that we can't fix our subject lines when they come out wrong. It's also unfortunate that the moderators here, myself included, don't have the tools to fix those!

BUT - I want to assure you, I knew immediately that the thread was about Sibelius - I think anyone here can easily figure that out.

Randy