OT: A comment on upgrading and support Was: Frame's future

[Diane Gaskill]

I've been lurking on this thread but I have a comment that might throw a
monkey wrench into the conversation.

It seems that sometimes people upgrade just to have the latest and
(hopefully) the greatest version of a sw product, car, music system, etc.
This includes Frame, Vista, and whatever.  But if the new version of a
product does not have a feature I need or has fixed a bug that has been
giving me trouble, I do not see the point in upgrading.  Why spend the money
and the time on installing something and take a chance on having more bugs
or incompatibilities on your system?

There's an old saying: "If it aint broke, don't fix it."  FM7.2 and
everything else I use in my job runs just fine on XP.  Believe it or not,
they also run fine on an old NT4 system I have at home (I have an XP system
there too).  I see no point in installing an OS because it's "New and
Improved" but could make my job a lot harder before it gets easier.
Deadlines don't wait for other companies to fix their bugs.

Also, a comment on what Adobe means by "support."  I remember a conversation
just like this a couple of years ago.  It was about the then current version
of FM and whether it would run on XP.  At the time, Adobe said, "We don't
support it."  But on further investitation, Adobe explained that they did
not say it would not run on XP, but that they had not completed their
testing and therefore could not guarantee that it would run or that there
were no bugs.  Therefore, no "official" support.  Sounds like good business
policy to me, and I'd guess the situation is at least similar with FM7.2 and
Vista.

Diane

================

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com]On
Behalf Of Steve Rickaby
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2007 8:39 AM
To: Fred Ridder; guy at hiskeyboard.com
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Frame's future


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
_