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 <[email protected]> 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. _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to [email protected] Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to [email protected]
