Frame's future

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:00 -0500 25/2/07, Fred Ridder wrote:

>What you stated was your interpretation, not a direct quote.

True. But stated immediately above a direct quote, namely:

'Adobe FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier do not support Windows Vista. However, Adobe currently plans to release the next major version of FrameMaker for Windows Vista.'

so hopefully no confusion was caused.

The quote was a quote and was clearly marked as such. I took the trouble to read the document right through because it may affect me, and not just for FrameMaker, and I was merely trying to be helpful to others who were affected but who didn't have time to read it.

>When a vendor says "does not support", it usually reflects a business decision rather than an unequivocal technical fact.

Sure. Maybe it's an issue of English: maybe I misunderstood. In future I will make sure that I sprinkle text with 'allegedly's, 'it would appear that's, and 'might's.

If the document had said 'Adobe does not support the use of FrameMaker 7.2 in Windows Vista', that would be one thing [i.e. it might work, it might not, but don't come crying to us if it doesn't], but it does not say that: it says 'FrameMaker <all versions> does not support Windows Vista'. In fact, this is an odd phraseology, and hard to interpret at all, because it reverses the normal order of things, that an OS supports an app and not the other way around.

The same document has another classification, 'Adobe... does not *officially* support <yahdeyah>', which it applies for example to Acrobat 8 and many others.
There are further implied sub-classification in the table at the end, between:

<app>	Not officially		Installs and runs with... known issues
<app>	Does not support	[Adobe] do not recommend...
<app>	Does not support	Adobe does not recommend installing...

but FrameMaker is none of these. It's:

<app>	Does not currently support	Support expected in next major release

Maybe I was reading too much between the lines, but I took this document to mean 'Lots of our stuff is so-so in Vista, but FrameMaker is a non-starter'.

Guy is absolutely right in picking holes with this document: as far as FrameMaker is concerned, it doesn't really tell you a lot. Where this leaves corporates with ageing Windows machines running lots of FrameMaker licenses is anyone's guess.

-- 
Steve