Is it necessary to upgrade software anymore?

if it works well enough what is the point of upgrading? that should be a rhetorical question...

personally i don't know that software can really have another huge jump in terms of functionality. what i would like to see is voice recognition or a foot pedal of some kind that controls the DAW while i am recording. i would pay for that upgrade.

Budgetary constraints, bad economy, laziness, none of it means as much to me as the fact that most of the software I own works well enough and is familiar to me.

I think that budget plays a small roll in making an upgrade decision. A bad economy etc...aren't really useful criteria to me.

What's your situation in regards to this? Will there ever be the kind of progress we saw when sequencers went from "just MIDI" to the modern DAW? What about other kinds of software?

Upgrading software is an economic tool on the part of the developers of software to generate growth and income. I think To entice people to upgrade though they have to offer them something they don't have. The trouble is that most people don't really need much, but are under the impression that they do need the coolest stuff on earth. In music software that is intensified. And IMHO there is a big gap between percieved need, and real need.

Such as Cake going from a Midi Sequencer to a program that can record audio and midi and snyc the two together. That upgrade path improved work flow and added extra features that made work processing work faster and/or easier. That was a huge improvement that benefited everyone.

As a business owner I only upgrade software when it's apparent I'll make more money/profit off of the upgrade. I can't speak to upgrading Sonar as I'm Nuendo based. But I can say that I've upgraded Waves for the last 4 years becuase of improvements they made that allowed me to work more effieciently, and thus deliver product to clients in a more timely manner. Well let's just say Waves contributed to delivery....

Now for basic software like Office--90% of the people I know would be fine with the basics and have very little need for what has been changed since Office 97. But they upgrade and upgrade regardless.
As for OS's--Win98 was great, XP was a leap forward. The in-between upgrades...ME, Vista etc...As you can tell from reading the forum most people have very little need to upgrade.

Absolutely not.
I'm sticking with Pong until I master it.

ORIGINAL: slartabartfast

Absolutely not.
I'm sticking with Pong until I master it.

Does one ever master Pong.

My Pong matures over time, much like a fine old Stilton.

ORIGINAL: Lil Droppa

i think software is finished. theres nowhere else to go.

Reminds me of a quote...

"I can't imagine ever needing more than 640K RAM." Loosely paraphrased from Bill Gates

When you decide there's nowhere to go, someone else will think of it. And you'll be left behind saying, "Why didn't I think of that?"

There's always somewhere to go, especially in user interface and workflow. The next step may be multitouch interface compatibility.

Of course this is coming from the guy still running Sonar 3

ORIGINAL: Nate

Now for basic software like Office--90% of the people I know would be fine with the basics and have very little need for what has been changed since Office 97. But they upgrade and upgrade regardless.
As for OS's--Win98 was great, XP was a leap forward. The in-between upgrades...ME, Vista etc...As you can tell from reading the forum most people have very little need to upgrade.

FWIW, I've been using Office 2000 since it came out and haven't been interested in any of the subsequent vers, especially since I'm a Word macro addict and have an extremely customized template. But I downloaded the trial of Office 2007 and think MS made some serious improvements to the UI. I'm using it about 90% of the time now... nearly all my customization translates... and I'll be upgrading once the trial (fully functional) expires.

I really like XP. Wasn't too interested in Vista. But based on the work they did in Office, I'm thinking Vista might be interesting. But at this point, why bother? I've got the Windows 7 beta but haven't installed it yet. I'll eventually get to it. Looking forward to it.

Firefox 2 to 3 was a nice upgrade.

Sonar 6 to 7 was disappointing. If I hadn't got 7, I'd probably get 8. But at this point I'm looking for more development of Sonar than they seem interested in delivering. It needs a more modern interface... I don't mean how it looks (though it could stand to be prettier)... but what it can do... and how it does it... more customization... and that takes better advantage of software's ability to do more than just model hardware functionality.

I think we should all go on a Sonar upgrade moratorium until it's got a functional routing matrix (and multi-destination routing) like Reaper.

And pitch-constant varispeed.