Dear Avid,¹

Monday, after noting that my copy of Sibelius 5 would not install on my new MacBook Pro – no surprise, it is after all 5-year-old software – I looked for some solutions online. It became clear that I wouldn’t be able to get it going, so I started looking at upgrading to Sibelius 7, about which I’ve heard many good things. Upgrading was an easy decision: I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Sibelius since I bought a copy of Sibelius 3 back in 2004.

Along the way, I stumbled on this blog post by Daniel Spreadbury. Curious what he meant by “the recent news about Avid’s corporate restructuring”, I followed the link.

By now, I’m sure you can see where this is going: like many other long-time Sibelius users, I’m more than a bit disgruntled by the news. Given that Sibelius has been an essential part of my musical creative process for nearly a decade now – a length of time dwarfed by others’ usage, but a quite substantial fraction of my own life – I was extremely disheartened to hear that you were disbanding the Sibelius development team in the interest of cost cutting.

To put it mildly, I think this a very poor decision. In cutting the development team, you are making it clear that you are unwilling to continue investing in the people who have made this such an excellent product. Indeed, your willingness to let go the very staff responsible for the creation and development of one of your more consistently profitable products suggests that you have only short-term profits in mind and are not, in fact, dedicated to the future success of the product – whatever your press releases may say.

Unfortunately for you and your shareholders, this strategy is almost certainly doomed to failure in the long-term. In the short-term, you will see increased profits from this move. You will not have to pay the salaries of these developers, and in outsourcing the development to Kiev, you will retain the ability to produce at least some code – the quality of such code is of course doubtful. In the long run, however, the outlook for Sibelius is not exactly good.

First, the software’s current dominance across Hollywood, university music programs, and private composer use is not easily sustained. It is the result of years of diligent effort by the development team to keep advancing the tool and to provide the best customer support in the field. You may be able to keep the product afloat, but you’ve already dismissed the most important part of its success: the people who created it, know it best, and have the creative vision to keep advancing it year after year. That combination of passion, knowledge, and vision is irreplaceable, and that is what has made Sibelius great.

Second, please understand that in making this move, you are alienating your core customer base – people you cannot afford to lose. These are the people who promote your product for you, who advocate for it to others, who encourage them to buy it over Finale or any of the other music scoring on the market. If you lose these enthusiasts, you are almost certain to lose many other customers, as well. Excited, knowledgeable user proponents are essential for the success of any software – far more effective than any other kind of marketing – and your decisions are clearly not in the best interest of these customers.

Rather, your actions demonstrate that you do not value your product, you do not value the people who are your customers, and you do not value your employees. This, in turn, means that you are not the kind of company I am interested in supporting. Avid is now a company I will tell everyone I know to avoid – not out of malice, but simply because I would rather not see money flow to a company with such a poor attitude toward its employees, its products, and its customers.

Of course, it is easy to dismiss this letter as insignificant. I am just one customer, after all. And those others like me who are disappointed are still but a fraction of your customer base. Moreover, Sibelius is not your primary product; it’s just a supplement to your profits.

However, as more and more of your customers come to share these conclusions about Avid, it will impact bottom line, and not in a way you like. Your poor treatment of Sibelius means that discerning customers will be slow to trust your promises about other products they rely on, including Pro Tools. Your poor treatment of the developers behind Sibelius means those same discerning customers will take their business to companies who value their employees more than you apparently do.

There is, however, a way out. It won’t maximize your profits in the short term. It will, however, earn you the good will of the Sibelius community.

Sell Sibelius. It is public knowledge that the Finn brothers² have offered at least twice to purchase the software back from you, in the dual interests of maintaining the momentum of the software and of taking care of the employees you have let go. Selling it back to them is the right move – for your customers, for the product, for the developers, and most importantly, for Avid. The goodwill of your customer base and the trust of your own employees are not small things in the long run.

As a long-time user of Sibelius, one of its many ardent fans, a frequent proselytizer, one of the many who have the highest respect for the Sibelius development team, please do the right thing by your customers and your former employees. You have claimed to care about the Sibelius community. Prove it. Show that you are interested in the best outcome for your customers and in the highest quality of products. That is the surest route to earning the trust of your customers and your employees – and therefore, the surest route to long-term, sustainable profitability.

Regards,

Chris Krycho