Frame's future

[Bill Briggs]

At 9:32 PM +0000 2/25/07, Paul Findon wrote:
>There is no law or SEC regulation that stipulates a minimum profitability for products, and Adobe could have simply raised the price if it really was such a major draw on expenses.

 And the really pathetic irony here is that Frame Technologies first got into financial trouble as a result of entering the Windows market. They priced it too low to entice the low end OS users to buy it. Oy.


>Let's tackle the points:
>
>* Cost of development: Can't be much with cheap Indian labor, up to 90% off!
>* Cost of QA: Use customers as beta testers.
>* Cost of support: The Web, mailing lists, and online forums cost nothing.
>* Cost of marketing: Did Adobe ever market FrameMaker?
>* Cost to make it MacOS X-compatible: Use cheap labor? We'd even be happy with a Carbon version. See below.

 I'd prefer it to be Carbon based. There are a things about Cocoa applications that are less desirable on several fronts.


>Quote from Apple developer site: "Carbon includes about 70 percent of the existing Mac OS APIs, covering about 95 percent of the functions used by applications. Because it includes most of the functions you rely on today, converting to Carbon is a straightforward process."
>
>From a user's point of view, let's just imagine for a moment a FrameMaker with all of the authoring and publishing capabilities that we've come to rely on running on the world's best OS, with PDF-based Quartz imaging for beautiful text, graphics, and PDF compatibility, OpenType, Unicode, automated workflows with AppleScript, ColorSync for WYSIWYG color, and the power, reliability, and stability of UNIX, not to mention easy access to all of our favorite UNIX tools. A technical writer's nirvana.

 Amen.

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