(Long Thread) Will DAWs ever get to evolve?

[cel4145]

It's much acclaimed 'Grid' and Note Grid is just a refinement an evolution of FL's Patcher and Logic's Environment
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FIFY

[CapnLockheed]

Will DAWs ever get to evolve?

I wasn't aware they had stopped. Will cars? Will people?

[Trensharo]

For decades Sibelius and Finale have had no improvement on how they function.

Finale, True.

Sibelius, False.

Opinions and Preferences aren't facts.

Beyond that, neither Sibelius nor Finale are in a position to radically change how they function - improvements or not. We're talking about user bases who can't grok a Ribbon UI. Many of them aren't even thinking about going to Dorico, no matter how great we or anyone hypes it up. They simply can't make that transition, and many of them are at a point in their careers where it simply isn't worth it.

In addition to that, those packages are big in Academia; so, there is an entire ecosystem of training material and training professionals that would be disrupted if they made any radical changes to the app. Disrupting this market with their own updates basically puts them at risk of ceding it to competitors when the changes are so drastic that the market sees this as an opportunity to reevaluate alternatives.

They are victims of their own successes and longevity.

Finale has been on the market for 34 years. Sibelius has been on the market for 29 years. Dorico has existed for 6 years, or so.

Dorico had no existing user base. There were no expectations. The users who chose Dorico did so because they were willing to have their worlds rocked - similar to the people who went from Pro Tools, Cubase, DP, SONAR, etc. to Studio One when it released. Dorico wasn't an upgrade to an existing software package they had been using for 10-20+ years that introduced sweeping changes. At the end of the day, productivity is king, and even a bad solution becomes productive to people who devote enough time to learning to use/operate it. Once you grow a large enough user base, it becomes borderline impossible to "fix the problems" without destroying much of that productivity.

This an issue with all longstanding products. The longer the product exists on the market, the harder it becomes to make radical changes - even if you think they are needed - because enough change deletes productivity advantages existing users have. This increases the viability of competitors.

The biggest issue with Finale is that the code base has not been maintained properly over the years. This isn't really an issue with Sibelius. I expect MuseScore to overtake Finale in the next few years, given the disparity in development pace. I think Sibelius will be fine. It became better than Finale over a decade ago, anyways. Finale is basically the WordPerfect of the Notation Software Market. It will eventually be the Lotus 1-2-3 of that market.