Desperately Need Legal FrameMaker 8!

[Alan Houser]

I don't get a vote, but I would love to see Adobe reconsider this policy 
with FrameMaker 9. Historically, even "major" FrameMaker releases were 
evolutionary, not revolutionary, in the design and behavior of the 
application. While perhaps not ideal, it was reasonably straight-forward 
to maintain mixed-version FrameMaker deployments.

Not so with FrameMaker 9. We have a new user interface, new behaviors 
(keyboard shortcuts come to mind), and new functionality. I would not 
want to run a mixed FM8/FM9 deployment in an organization. But the 
alternative is to upgrade everybody when an organization needs as few as 
one new FrameMaker license.

I acknowledge that Adobe is in business to make a profit, and Adobe 
_wants_ everybody to upgrade. But there are costs and side effects of 
upgrading, particularly in workgroup deployments. Policies that "force" 
upgrades can lead to customer resentment and pursuit of 
non-Adobe-sanctioned sales channels.

Adobe knows its markets far better than I do, but I bet Adobe could 
still sell plenty of FM8 seats, with acceptably low cannibalization of 
FM9 sales, if FM8 remained in the price book.

-Alan
---

Alan Houser, President
Group Wellesley, Inc.
412-363-3481
www.groupwellesley.com



Dov Isaacs wrote:
> FWIW, no company is ever going to get any additional copies of FrameMaker 8
> shipped from Adobe or any of our channel partners. The fact is that Adobe
> very carefully controls how much inventory there is in the channel so that
> by the time a new release is announced and shipping, the likelihood of finding
> any significant number of copies of the earlier release for sale is relatively
> low. This is true for all Adobe products. The only place where you might find
> such older versions would be at the "end" of the channel, software retailers
> themselves who may not be moving many copies of a particular product.
> For better or worse, not too many software retailers actually stock FrameMaker;
> they usually get it for you on special order from their distributors and often
> have it "drop shipped" to you. As such, they are unlikely to have any inventory
> of the older versions.
>
> 	- Dov
>
>   
>