How many FM users are there?

[Diane Gaskill]

Wow.  What a wonderfully informative email.  This one will go straight to the Director's inbox as well as my manager's for sure.

Thank you SO much, Max.  

Best Regards,

Diane

==========


-----Original Message-----
>From: Maxwell Hoffmann <mhoffmann at translate.com>
>Sent: May 10, 2007 9:01 AM
>To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
>Subject: RE: How many FM users are there?
>
>
>Diane,
>
>When I left Frame Tech in 1994, internal metrics and intelligent speculation put the total number of worldwide licenses at around 300K. With Wanock's listing of 500K 5 years later, you could  assume liberal growth of 40,000 licenses per year which would put the probable current figure at an additional 280,000 licenses for a total of 780,000. If you cut the growth figure in half to be conservative, the total number of licenses is probably 640,000.
>
>I think 650,000 total licenses would be a safe, conservative figure.
>
>FYI -- when I worked at Frame Tech and many of the licenses sold were still UNIX (the PC was taking off by 1993), Frame estimated that only about 15% of users actually registered their licenses. I don't know what the reg rate is for Adobe, but that is one of the reasons that it is very challenging for a vendor to have accurate figures on actual numbers of licenses in use.
>
>Regarding your earlier posting in late April (what are some of the advantages that structured FrameMaker has over Arbortext) here are a few insights. I've worked with a few customers whose management insisted on migration to Arbortext, while much of production stayed in FrameMaker during the interim. Even with experienced users who are "up" on XML structure, Arbortext takes far longer than FrameMaker to design and test templates. Arbortext Architect (the special license required to create style sheets) used to cost $15K. FrameMaker's advantage is that every license is a "template creator" at no additional cost.
>
>My company continued to design and support the structured application files in FrameMaker for one account that had parallel Arbortext publishing and development. Feedback we received is that it took ENLASO 4 business days to develop significant format changes for XML publishing that took over 3.5 weeks of testing and development in Arbortext. Naturally, some of this may be dependent on the intelligence of expertise of the staff involved. But in general I have observed that structured FrameMaker is much swifter than Arbortext when it comes to making significant structural and formatting changes to an application.
>
>The customer in question used very sophisticated page and PDF formatting that went beyond most "streamline" formatting associated with XML applications. (Lots of fancy tables, and lots of 3 level lists w/in tables.)
>
>Because Arbortext does not give a "literal" page representation, there are often surprises at print/output time from target languages that cause text expansion. One more reason that FrameMaker's embedded EDD with formatting rules and "real" page display gives an advantage.
>
>The single biggest reason to stick with FrameMaker over Arbortext would be if you have multilingual projects that occasionally require maintaining the same page breaks as the source English. In Arbortext that would require an awful lot of "PDF previews" to achieve.
>
>Another reason for sticking with structured FrameMaker is if your company or division has a desire to "go all XML" corporate wide. FrameMaker has a much lower learning curve than Arbortext, and is far easier for Word users to master it than Arbortext. End users in Arbortext (who won't be involved in format design, etc.) have a considerable amount of training to go through to master the system which is less intuitive. If I had to distill it down to a crude observation I would say that Arbortext was designed for engineers and FrameMaker was designed for "everybody else." -- p.s. I went through 4 weeks of Arbortext training a few years ago. Recent demos indicate that the publishing paradigm is still similar to what I was trained on.
>
>I hope this helps. Feel free to contact me directly if you need more insights.
>
>
>
>Maxwell Hoffmann
>Manager of Consulting & Training Solutions
>ENLASO Corporation
>T: 805 494 9571 * F: 805 435 1920
>E: mhoffmann at translate.com <mailto:mhoffmann at translate.com>  ♦ ENLASO Corporation provides quality enterprise language solutions and exceeds client expectations through continuing research, development, and implementation of effective localization processes and technologies.  Visit: www.translate.com <http://www.translate.com/>  for more information or to subscribe to our complimentary localization newsletter. 
>http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellhoffmann
>
>>Message: 1
>>Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 23:28:22 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
>>From: Diane Gaskill <dgcaller at earthlink.net>
>>Subject: How many FM users are there?
>>To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
>>Message-ID:
>>	<30813912.1178692103115.JavaMail.root at elwamui-huard.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
>>	
>>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I know Adobe keeps all of their numbers a Big Secret, but I am creating a comparison spreadsheet in my research on FM vs AT and I need to have a general idea of how many FM seats have been installed.  FM has been in use since the late 1980s and I would estimate at least 100K seats.  If anyone on the list can provide an more accurate number, I'd really appreciate the information.  Incidentally, PTC says they have 20K installed seats.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Diane