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.
For a company with 2006 sales of $2.5 billion, net profit of $505
million (would have been higher without Macromedia merger), and
assets of $5.9 billion, one could almost feel sorry for Adobe.
Apparently, Adobe's CEO earned $930,000, with a $1 million bonus.
That's the kind of cash I regularly loose down the back of the sofa,
so I can really sympathize.
Sarcasm aside, Adobe cannot deny that it is partly to blame for poor
sales of FrameMaker - on all platforms. Those of us that have been
FrameMaker users for near on 20 years are fully aware of Adobe's
failure to develop, promote, and deliver on its potential since
buying Frame Technology in 1995.
Mac OS X was announced in 1998. At that time, my company was still
using version 5.5.6. Having used FrameMaker on NeXTSTEP for several
years, I knew that Mac OS X would be a great OS and I wanted it for
my company. We've never been that quick to upgrade, and knowing full
well that Mac OS X was just around the corner was a good reason to
wait, for in just a few years, or so we thought, we'd have the power,
reliability, and style of NeXTSTEP on the Mac and FrameMaker to go
with it. Several versions of Mac OS X came and went but still we
waited. Then, out of the blue, in March 2004 Adobe announced that it
was discontinuing Mac FrameMaker and there were no plans for a Mac OS
X version.
Given those circumstances, it's hardly surprising that Mac FrameMaker
sales were slow. Fast forward to 2006 and we see exactly the same
thing happening all over again, although this time Adobe acknowledges
that sales of Creative Suite are slow because users are waiting for
an Intel version. See Adobe's latest F10K filing for details.
Funny how Adobe accepts poor sales of Creative Suite are due to
customers waiting for an Intel version, but won't acknowledge that
Mac FrameMaker sales were slow because users were waiting for a Mac
OS X version. The demand was there, but Adobe never made the product.
How can you blame customers for not buying a product that never even
existed? You don't need a business degree to understand that this is
simple chicken and egg stuff. It would be like Apple saying, "oh, we
never made an MP3 player because there was no demand." Sometimes, a
company has to create the demand, build a market, things that Adobe
did not do with FrameMaker.
Adobe could have pushed FrameMaker as a 1st class word processor and
cut the price. Throw in a spreadsheet, a cut-down version of
Illustrator, and a Powerpoint alternative and you have a whole new
office platform. With Microsoft encroaching more and more into
Adobe's markets (i.e., Expression Studio), Adobe may soon be wishing
it had done something like this.
Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>
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