Frame's future

[Paul Findon]

On 21 Feb 2007, at 16:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:

> Comparing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker to a Ford
> Taurus is not a valid analogy. FrameMaker on Macintosh was
> NEVER a best-seller. It was a very small fraction of the
> FrameMaker user base, smaller than even Unix, that did not
> justify the continued expense of development, QA, support,
> and marketing -- especially given the cost of major changes
> to make it MacOS X-compatible.

For a company with 2006 sales of $2.5 billion, net profit of $505  
million (would have been higher without Macromedia merger), and  
assets of $5.9 billion, one could almost feel sorry for Adobe.

Apparently, Adobe's CEO earned $930,000, with a $1 million bonus.  
That's the kind of cash I regularly loose down the back of the sofa,  
so I can really sympathize.

Sarcasm aside, Adobe cannot deny that it is partly to blame for poor  
sales of FrameMaker - on all platforms. Those of us that have been  
FrameMaker users for near on 20 years are fully aware of Adobe's  
failure to develop, promote, and deliver on its potential since  
buying Frame Technology in 1995.

Mac OS X was announced in 1998. At that time, my company was still  
using version 5.5.6. Having used FrameMaker on NeXTSTEP for several  
years, I knew that Mac OS X would be a great OS and I wanted it for  
my company. We've never been that quick to upgrade, and knowing full  
well that Mac OS X was just around the corner was a good reason to  
wait, for in just a few years, or so we thought, we'd have the power,  
reliability, and style of NeXTSTEP on the Mac and FrameMaker to go  
with it. Several versions of Mac OS X came and went but still we  
waited. Then, out of the blue, in March 2004 Adobe announced that it  
was discontinuing Mac FrameMaker and there were no plans for a Mac OS  
X version.

Given those circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Mac FrameMaker  
sales were slow. Fast forward to 2006 and we see exactly the same  
thing happening all over again, although this time Adobe acknowledges  
that sales of Creative Suite are slow because users are waiting for  
an Intel version. See Adobe's latest F10K filing for details.

Funny how Adobe accepts poor sales of Creative Suite are due to  
customers waiting for an Intel version, but won't acknowledge that  
Mac FrameMaker sales were slow because users were waiting for a Mac  
OS X version. The demand was there, but Adobe never made the product.  
How can you blame customers for not buying a product that never even  
existed? You don't need a business degree to understand that this is  
simple chicken and egg stuff. It would be like Apple saying, "oh, we  
never made an MP3 player because there was no demand." Sometimes, a  
company has to create the demand, build a market, things that Adobe  
did not do with FrameMaker.

Adobe could have pushed FrameMaker as a 1st class word processor and  
cut the price. Throw in a spreadsheet, a cut-down version of  
Illustrator, and a Powerpoint alternative and you have a whole new  
office platform. With Microsoft encroaching more and more into  
Adobe's markets (i.e., Expression Studio), Adobe may soon be wishing  
it had done something like this.

Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>