Tim Mariott
01-14-2014, 07:43 PM
Hi Sherry
I'm back again for my six-monthly intensive work for our next choir concert (two major concerts per year) and incidentally have an enquiry from a friend who is just starting out with music notation software for another choir.
Now I have been very happy with Notation Composer, having by now understood its features and any limitations for my interests and having identified, with your valuable assistance, necessary workarounds - but I am a bit troubled by the silence around new releases and so have some reservations about recommending Notation as a long term solution for someone else's requirements.
Before retirement, I worked in the IT industry for some 30 years, working for small software product suppliers and then for integrators charged with assessing products and I know that a large contributor to confidence in the long term viabiltiy of a software product is a visible and credible product roadmap.
Sadly I cannot yet see any evidence for such a roadmap for the Notation software. I find that the reliance to date on the basic announcement on the change of ownership is a threadbare substitute for a clear statement on the long term viability of the product. Surely by now the new management team should have been able to put together something better to give confidence to current users and potential purchasers.
I am a real enthusiast for the product and hope that it will see me out for my "working life" as a musician, even if that means using an obsolete version of software with a defunct supplier.
But that does not mean that I am happy to encourage my friends to invest in the product. It is not really a matter of the cost of purchase: it is the effort required to master sufficient of the product for one's own interests and then the investment made in sets of music files which might later have to be converted to another format.
I appreciate that this is not a simple support question to which you can give a direct answer but I would hope that you can pass on my concerns to the management teams.
Please encourage them to convince me that I should be recommending to my friends that Notation does have a stable future. I hate to say it, but you do have reasonable competitors and unless you have really strong unique selling factors then potential pruchasers may look elsewhere at products which seem to have a more assured future.
With best wishes
Tim Marriott
I'm back again for my six-monthly intensive work for our next choir concert (two major concerts per year) and incidentally have an enquiry from a friend who is just starting out with music notation software for another choir.
Now I have been very happy with Notation Composer, having by now understood its features and any limitations for my interests and having identified, with your valuable assistance, necessary workarounds - but I am a bit troubled by the silence around new releases and so have some reservations about recommending Notation as a long term solution for someone else's requirements.
Before retirement, I worked in the IT industry for some 30 years, working for small software product suppliers and then for integrators charged with assessing products and I know that a large contributor to confidence in the long term viabiltiy of a software product is a visible and credible product roadmap.
Sadly I cannot yet see any evidence for such a roadmap for the Notation software. I find that the reliance to date on the basic announcement on the change of ownership is a threadbare substitute for a clear statement on the long term viability of the product. Surely by now the new management team should have been able to put together something better to give confidence to current users and potential purchasers.
I am a real enthusiast for the product and hope that it will see me out for my "working life" as a musician, even if that means using an obsolete version of software with a defunct supplier.
But that does not mean that I am happy to encourage my friends to invest in the product. It is not really a matter of the cost of purchase: it is the effort required to master sufficient of the product for one's own interests and then the investment made in sets of music files which might later have to be converted to another format.
I appreciate that this is not a simple support question to which you can give a direct answer but I would hope that you can pass on my concerns to the management teams.
Please encourage them to convince me that I should be recommending to my friends that Notation does have a stable future. I hate to say it, but you do have reasonable competitors and unless you have really strong unique selling factors then potential pruchasers may look elsewhere at products which seem to have a more assured future.
With best wishes
Tim Marriott