[Framers] Framers Digest, Vol 161, Issue 8

[Graeme R Forbes]

> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 08:16:14 +1200
> From: Alan Litchfield <alan at alphabyte.co.nz>
> ...and it was an unfortunate mistake to allow the 
> stoush with Apple (if that was what it is was) close the door on having 
> FM on the Mac.

The official Adobe explanation at the time, iirc, was that sale of upgrades from earlier versions to FM7 had been “disappointing” on the Mac side. This sounded to me like they were looking for an excuse to discontinue it on the Mac. The most common request from Mac users was that an OSX-native version of FM be created. FM7 added some bells and whistles (e.g. structured FM included) but hardly enough to justify the upgrade cost for many Mac users: crucially, it wasn’t OSX-native, meaning it was going to be doomed when Apple dropped Classic as a consequence of switching from PowerPC to Intel chips (10.4, “Tiger” I think, was the last OS to ship with Classic, an emulation of OS9). Without any reassurance that an X-native version was in the works, it was entirely predictable that the upgrade to FM7 would sell poorly to Mac customers. I’ve always assumed that Adobe just decided that the development cost of an X-native version wasn’t recoverable, especially if you factored in likely extra sales of InDesign to Mac users as  a substitute (or Windows FM to run in a vm). I hadn’t heard of some behind the scenes dispute with Apple, tho’ of course that could be part of the explanation as well.

Two or three years ago there was a query from someone at Adobe, either on this list or the old “FM for OSX” webpage (no longer exists, it seems), trying to gauge demand for a new Mac version of FM. Wonder what became of that? But this from Stefan Gentz of Adobe a bit over a year ago:

“If there is a substantial interest in the market for a FrameMaker for MacOS version, we will look at it. Currently, the situation is simply, that the number of tech writers working on a Mac is vanishingly low compared to the Windows community. And those who are doing tech writing on Mac are usually happy with InDesign.” Something of a hen-or-egg issue here...

Graeme Forbes