Customer Support in Adobe is non-existent

[Klaus Daube]

Friends of FremeMaker,

Before blaming the bad customer support of Adobe for some situation, 
please consider the following (my personal opinion/experience):

- Will You get manufacturer support for a 15 year old car? You may find 
a garage 
  somewhere out there which still has some spare parts in their 
backyarad or have
  found out that some parts of the new cars also fit in the old ones. 
But You need
  to thind this yourself (with the help of Your friends).

- Once we have an FM-realease 9 available, and related software 
(Acrobat) has also
  reached level 9 one can not assume that all combinations of old-new 
versions are
  working. There is no such thing as guaranteed backwards 
compatibility. Have You
  tried to run Word-6 macros in Word-2007? Even upwards compatibility 
is rare.

- FrameMaker is one of the most tolerant programs I know concerning age 
of documents.
  You can still open version 3 documents in FM-9 and always save at 
least 1 level
  lower than the current version is. In FM-9 you even can save in MIF-
7. This is to
  serve the 'before Unicode' environments. Of course the development 
leaves certain
  functions behind (FM-9 does not support the virtual fonts needed 
until FM-7 for
  "non-western" languages). At which date cars lost their hand crank or 
the windows
  hand lever? If a thunderstorm arrives you need to have the key for 
the car to close
  the windows!

- If it works, don't fix it. There are so many automatic processes out 
there using
  the good old FM-5.5 on Unix (e.g. Statistisches Amt des Kantons 
Luzern, Schweizerische
  Nationalbank) generating statistical brochures and books month after 
month. They will
  use this mechanism even after Adobe may have ceased to exist.

- Like any company also Adobe wants to make money with their work. In 
recent time
  Adobe has increased interaction with their customers significantly 
and fixing
  problems in FrameMaker really has a new pace. Do You get fixes for 
Windows 2K any
  more? Of course support always concentrates on the new products and 
deminishes for
  the old ones. Even companies have only a limited 'brain' to keep 
knowledge.

Klaus Daube 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Docu + Design Daube; Schäracher 11; CH-8053 Zürich
Technical documentation & consultancy; On-line and paper
F: +41-44-422 86 25  E: ddd at daube.ch  W: www.daube.ch