On 21 Feb 2007, at 16:28, Dov Isaacs wrote:
Comparing the Macintosh version of FrameMaker to a Ford
Taurus is not a valid analogy. FrameMaker on Macintosh was
NEVER a best-seller. It was a very small fraction of the
FrameMaker user base, smaller than even Unix, that did not
justify the continued expense of development, QA, support,
and marketing -- especially given the cost of major changes
to make it MacOS X-compatible.
This is the party line that we've heard already. Only a very select
bunch know if it's really true or not, or the numbers involved. Even
if it is, it still means that the decision to discontinue Mac
FrameMaker was just someone's opinion, or Adobe management's 03/04
criteria of what constitutes an acceptable ROI for a software
product. In other words, revenue minus effort must be greater than
$X, otherwise we discontinue.
Even if we take a stab at 5,000 Mac seats, at $800 a pop that's $4
million. (Some of us are prepared to pay even more. Then there's the
people who don't even know it exists due to zero marketing.) A
smaller, younger, hungrier, more agile company may decide that it's a
market worth going after, especially with Mac OS X's recent growth in
educational and scientific markets, both of which require the tech.
publishing capabilities of a tool like FrameMaker. There is no law or
SEC regulation that stipulates a minimum profitability for products,
and Adobe could have simply raised the price if it really was such a
major draw on expenses.
Only John Warnock fully understood FrameMaker and wanted to buy Frame
Technology when it was put up for sale. No one else in Adobe shared
his vision, and when he was replaced by Bruce Chizen in 2000,
FrameMaker's future became even more vulnerable. Old Adobe would have
continued to support Mac FrameMaker. New Adobe decided not to.
FrameMaker is now in the hands of Adobe India, where software
engineers' salaries can be up to 90% less than their U.S.
counterparts, which kind of throws even more doubt on the "continued
expense of development" argument.
Let's tackle the points:
* Cost of development: Can't be much with cheap Indian labor, up to
90% off!
* Cost of QA: Use customers as beta testers.
* Cost of support: The Web, mailing lists, and online forums cost
nothing.
* Cost of marketing: Did Adobe ever market FrameMaker?
* Cost to make it MacOS X-compatible: Use cheap labor? We'd even be
happy with a Carbon version. See below.
Quote from Apple developer site: "Carbon includes about 70 percent of
the existing Mac OS APIs, covering about 95 percent of the functions
used by applications. Because it includes most of the functions you
rely on today, converting to Carbon is a straightforward process."
From a user's point of view, let's just imagine for a moment a
FrameMaker with all of the authoring and publishing capabilities that
we've come to rely on running on the world's best OS, with PDF-based
Quartz imaging for beautiful text, graphics, and PDF compatibility,
OpenType, Unicode, automated workflows with AppleScript, ColorSync
for WYSIWYG color, and the power, reliability, and stability of UNIX,
not to mention easy access to all of our favorite UNIX tools. A
technical writer's nirvana.
Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>
_______________________________________________
You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe send a blank email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
or visit
http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com
Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit
http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
