John, do you have any clue as to whether the maker of the Finale music notation program (i.e. Coda Music Technology, Inc.) monitors the IWBNI site?

The only clues I have are those that result from the following reasoning:

I do not believe that Coda would ever officially support the IWBNI site by saying publicly that they monitor the site. I believe this may be because they have no control over the site as I do not work for Coda and I am not a beta tester. After all, they don't even officially say that they monitor the Finale Discussion List which has been in existence for years. But put yourself in their place. If you were running a company and wanted it to be successful, wouldn't you want to gather as much suggestion-related and vote-related information as possible? Especially when that information is being written by and collected from some of the most experienced users in the community.

But suppose for a moment that the unlikely is true. That is, suppose they do not look at the IWBNI site. The next question would be: Does Coda look at the products produced by the competition? At this point, I believe that most of the good competition is fully aware of and monitors the IWBNI site. For example, the makers of Sibelius (i.e. The Sibelius Group) have been known to monitor the Finale Discussion List and everyone on the list knows about the IWBNI site. I would think that the same could be said of the makers of Igor (NoteHeads AB), Music Press (Graphire Corp.) and SCORE (San Andreas Press). While many of the suggestions on the site are specific to Finale, and Coda would benefit most from these suggestions, a large percentage of the suggestions are more general and thus could be applied to any music notation program. If the competition implements some of these IWBNI suggestions and Coda is watching the competition, then it is likely that eventually Coda will see these suggestions indirectly. And, it is possible that these suggestions will be implemented in Finale, eventually.

Finally, suppose Coda does not look at the IWBNI site and they totally ignore competing products. Well, let us hope that for all those who like to use the Finale product that this is not the case.

John Greschak
July 11, 2000