[Framers] Framers Digest, Vol 161, Issue 8

[Robert Lauriston]

The last Mac version of FrameMaker was 7.0, released in 2002.

By that point, FrameMaker was pretty much a niche product for
technical documentation and SGML. Many of its users were in large
corporations that had standardized or were standardizing on Windows.
FM was at best #3 or #4 in the Mac desktop publishing market, after
Quark, InDesign, and maybe PageMaker. The chances were slim that Adobe
would get a return on the significant investment it would have taken
to port FM to OS X.

On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 2:00 PM Graeme R Forbes
<graeme.forbes at colorado.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.