At 9:32 PM +0000 2/25/07, Paul Findon wrote: >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.
And the really pathetic irony here is that Frame Technologies first got into financial trouble as a result of entering the Windows market. They priced it too low to entice the low end OS users to buy it. Oy. >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. I'd prefer it to be Carbon based. There are a things about Cocoa applications that are less desirable on several fronts. >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. Amen. - web