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Don’t Sell (Out)

Today, it came to my attention that Avid, maker of various audio and video processing tools – tools you’ve heard of if you’re in those industries, high profile names like Pro Tools – has closed down the main office responsible for developing Sibelius and sourced the development to a team in the Ukraine.

Nothing against the Ukrainians, but shutting down the London development office responsible for nearly two decades and replacing it with a team a third its size does not bode well for future development.

Box art for Sibelius 7

This came out in as underhanded a way as possible, with the sorts of PR doublespeak and carefully prepared press releases I’ve come to expect from large corporations. Avid’s statements indicated that they were consolidating their engineering efforts in order to save money. Since Sibelius seems to be quite profitable, it’s clear that Avid is choosing to bleed the product to support its other goals. This move, in other words, reeks of bean-counting trumping any love of product or any real concern for the customers that have invested in Sibelius over the last several decades – invested more than money.

If Avid actually cared about its own employees or about the software, the company would sell Sibelius back to its founders, Ben and Jonathan Finn, who have offered twice to buy the company back, in order to keep the software going and its developers employed. Avid will have none of it. They want the profits with none of the investment.1

This sort of things is increasingly common in the tech industry, and it’s tragic. A large corporation will buy out a smaller one for the talent, or for the profitable software which it then runs into the ground by mismanagement, or just to stamp out possible competition with its own offerings. The market is poorer for it, the original developers watch their vision founder on the hard rocks of corporate bureaucracy, and the users lose out in the end.2

There’s a takeaway here for developers. If you care about your product at all – and I’m assuming you do, because if you’re just in it for the money, you’re probably not making the kind of product I buy anyway – then don’t sell. The moment you sell your company, no matter how good the sum, you’ve sold out. I’ve seen it happen too many times to believe otherwise.3

Truth be told, I don’t blame you. Not really. It’s hard to turn down millions of dollars as a reward for your hard work. The deal may look quite sweet up front, especially when the buyers have every reason to persuade they’ll take good care of your baby. But they won’t. They don’t love your creation like you do; in some sense, they can’t. They haven’t poured the hours of effort into it that you have; they don’t understand the beautiful intricacies that you do; they don’t have the passion that drove you to create it in the first place.

Your product may not wither on the vine the first month or year after it’s bought, but the time will come when someone high up the food chain is pushing numbers around – someone who loves numbers but doesn’t love product, and sad to say but there are a lot of those giving the quality MBAs a bad name – and your product will suddenly face the chopping block. Either it will die, or its developers will be forced to make compromises they would never have made under better leadership, or the product will simply be pushed into a niche it was never meant for. 4 If you sold it, you’re out of luck. Maybe you’ll be able to persuade the company to sell it back to you, but more likely they’ll take the profits until they run the product into the ground.

So don’t sell out – which is to say, don’t sell. Don’t take the money they’ll hand you if you care about the product you’ve made, no matter how tempting. I, your user, need you to hold on to the vision. If you’re ready to step aside, that’s okay – but find someone to replace you who shares your love of the product and your vision for the niche it fills in the market. You owe that to the users who have gotten you where you are. We want nothing more than to keep supporting you as you make the great products we love.5


  1. The post is only available to subscribers, so here’s the text of Ben and Jonathan Finn’s comments:

    We were very concerned to hear earlier this month that Avid is terminating the jobs of the Sibelius development team in London and handing the software over to other programmers, apparently to cut costs. As far as we know, Sibelius continues to be extremely successful, so this cost-cutting is a response to financial problems elsewhere in Avid, not with Sibelius itself.

    Ever since then we have been quietly trying to do everything we can to change this situation, including twice offering to buy Sibelius back from Avid. However, Avid has declined. While they haven’t given a reason, we assume that Sibelius is a substantial source of profits to them, so they don’t want to sell it to anyone.

    We naturally feel very sad about this treatment of our friends and colleagues who have been key to making Sibelius a success, and who have become the world experts in this specialized field. We are also very grateful to the many Sibelius users who have expressed their concern and support; though at this point, it seems unlikely that any protests will change Avid’s mind.

    We hope Sibelius nonetheless continues to be the world’s most successful music notation software.

    Ben & Jonathan Finn Sibelius founders

  2. So will the big company that makes this move in the end. This is a surefire way to lose your customers. More on that tomorrow in the form of an open letter to the folks at Avid – when I’m less angry and can write more rationally.

  3. I’ve seen some folks suggesting that the solution here is open source. That sounds nice in theory, but the reality is that I’ve never seen an open source product that could compete with a closed source product in the areas that matter for consumer software. Linux is great, but there’s a reason the "year of the Linux desktop" is permanently mythical. If you want really top-notch software, you’ll pay for it, because people have to eat. There’s more to say about this, but that’s for another post.

  4. This is the third time I’ve been bitten by this in the last six months. It’s getting old. I saw it with Mass Effect 3, which bore the clear imprint of corporate takeover killing company vision and culture with EA taking over Bioware a few years ago. I saw it with Sparrow, which has now abandoned all future development on a product lots of Mac and iOS users were excited about after its developers were acquired – for talent, not product – by Google. And now I’ve seen it with Sibelius, just a few short years after Avid purchased it.

  5. Should Ben or Jonathan Finn happen to read this, understand: I’m not criticizing your decision. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I’ve no doubt Avid looked like a good move at the time. I wish you the very best of luck in reacquiring Sibelius, and if you do I’ll be one of your first customers and one of your loudest supporters. And should Daniel Spreadbury happen by, know that you have my very highest regard and thanks for the support – some of it despite official statements that my situation was very much not supported – over the last couple years.

Discussion

  • I am totally in it for the money! That’s why, out of all the professions for which I could have prepared, I picked Computer Engineering.

    If I wasn’t in it for the money, I would be in a different field, namely, musical theater (fact).

    And you’re talking about $$,$$$,$$$!

    Offer a rejoinder↓
    • Totally true. Because of that, however, I have strong reason to believe you’re never going to be the impetus behind a project like Sibelius. (Like I said: this note really isn’t for you; you’re not the kind of developer who’s likely to create a product I’m going to fall in love with before watching it get bought out by a behemoth and run into the ground.)

      And yes, it is a lot of money. Unfortunately, that money comes with a cost.

      This is one of the reasons why I’ve struggled with some of the ideas I’ve had for startups… because I can’t see ever just handing it over to someone, unless I was really sure they had the same vision I did. Certainly I couldn’t see selling it to a Google/Facebook/etc. if it were the sort of thing to catch their attention. Too much heart and soul in it.

      You and I do programming for different reasons, methinks. I like the money aspect of it, and that contributes significantly to my doing it for a day job, but I’d still be doing web development and design just for the sheer joy of it even if it weren’t a paying job. That is, after all, how it ended up becoming a paying job for me. ;)

      Offer a rejoinder↓
    • I’d suggest it’s more like saying that he’s not going to be remembered as an innovative composer or songwriter. Which he won’t, because he isn’t. No one buys an album because of a studio musician who played on it – but that’s no slur on his quality as a musician; it’s a statement of what sort of musician he is. He may be the best studio cellist in the world, but that’s not the same as being Yo-Yo Ma. We need really good studio cellists and developers who come at it from your angle. That’s how I make my bread and butter, too. But they’re different beasts.

      Offer a rejoinder↓

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