Breaking: Sibelius owner is delisted from Nasdaq
mainA major blow for Avid, the tech company that took over Sibelius software and got rid of its core development staff.
Avid was today dropped from the Nasdaq share index after questions about its performance. Full report here.
Avid closed at $4.93 yesterday, down more than 28% from Friday’s close. Avid was first listed on NASDAQ in 1993 and its share price had once reached as high as $66 in 2005
Well, there’s a lesson learnt.
We’ve seen this coming for a while, alongside the downward trajectory of Avid stock. Avid has seen it coming too, yet the Sword of Damocles still fell. There are the usual feelgood statements from Avid about ‘future plans’, but without a fundamental rebuilding of the company’s core values into vision, enterprise and service, it boils down to “by their deeds shall ye know them”.
That’s not to say I don’t wish them success, in the sense that it’s in our interests for Avid to recover enough for the products we’ve bought from them in good faith to at least survive, let alone thrive, but they DID sack the Sibelius development team. As a direct consequence, the world’s leading scorewriter development team is now working for Avid’s cashed up competitor, Yamaha-Steinberg in London, the very city that Avid said was impractical and unaffordable, to develop a rival application for Sibelius.
Soon you may be using musescore then.
I would wish Sibelius to still be there, but it doesn’t look to promising.
While the concern here is, understandably, for Sibelius, a failure of Avid would be a major blow to the film industry, as Media Composer is pretty much the standard computer-editing application these days.