RE: The case against M$ Word

["Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com>]

Gary Schnabl wrote:
 
> As to my believing that FrameMaker is nearing EOL: Adobe.com does not
> list FrameMaker among its 14 top-tier products on its home page.
> InDesign is among the top 14... To get to FrameMaker via linking from
> Adobe's home page, one must click on the More Products hyperlink. The
> next page then lists 12 major products, of which none is FrameMaker.
To
> finally get to FrameMaker 8, one must click on a More Products
hyperlink
> a second time and select FrameMaker 8 via a drop-down menu.

FYI, you can get to it faster: on the home page (adobe.com), mouse over
Solutions and then click either Print publishing or Technical
communication. 

If you do click More Products, the 12 featured products on the Products
page (adobe.com/products) must rotate; I just went there, and FM 8 was
one of the 12. And the drop-down All products list is not on yet another
page, it's right there below the featured 12. 

In any case, if your argument amounts to claiming that all the products
not featured on the home page are nearing EOL or unimportant to Adobe --
well, I can only suggest that people look at the All products list and
ask themselves how many of those are really going away. 

FM doesn't command the kind of sales that, say, Photoshop or Dreamweaver
do. But like Authorware, Flex, etc., it fills an important product niche
and keeps some important customers. 

> Adobe will continue to include more bug fixes from FM 8 (FM 7.1, and
7.2
> to a smaller extent, was essentially a bug fix that needed to be paid
> for...) and incorporate enough new "features" in order to justify or
> entice its users to pay for an upgrade or two. After a passage of
time,
> there will few reasons to offer both InDesign and FrameMaker as
separate
> standalone apps because Adobe will place a higher priority on InDesign
> due to competition. Ergo, InDesign CSx will coopt FrameMaker's
remaining
> functions and users, and FrameMaker will be dropped.

Apparently you're unfamiliar with the significant development that went
into FM 8 and the new Technical Communication Suite (I think I called it
Technical Publishing Suite earlier; sorry). You don't rewrite the entire
FM core code to support Unicode and then upgrade and integrate multiple
applications to create a suite unless you intend to profit from that
work for a long time. 

FM and the TCS will be around for the foreseeable future. That will
become even clearer when FM 9 and TPS 2 ship. :-)

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
------






^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 2009 is your all-in-one authoring and publishing 
solution. Author in Doc-To-Help's XML-based editor,  Microsoft Word or 
HTML and publish to the Web, Help systems or printed manuals. 
http://www.doctohelp.com

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

---
You are currently subscribed to TECHWR-L as archive -at- web -dot- techwr-l -dot- com -dot- 

To unsubscribe send a blank email to 
techwr-l-unsubscribe -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
or visit http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/options/techwr-l/archive%40web.techwr-l.com


To subscribe, send a blank email to techwr-l-join -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com

Send administrative questions to admin -at- techwr-l -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.techwr-l.com/ for more resources and info. 

Please move off-topic discussions to the Chat list, at:
http://lists.techwr-l.com/mailman/listinfo/techwr-l-chat