Mac OS X Version

> I would think that Apple would be giving away its compiler by now.

They do -- the GCC. The developer tools are on the install DVD.

I used Macs early in my career, up until the point that the applications I needed were no longer available. But just to offer a contrarian opinion on the subject, heres an interesting exercise. Pretend for a moment that youre a developer interested in developing for the Mac and Windows market. Log on to the Microsoft and Apple web sites and take inventory of the various programming languages available for both platforms, as well as the availability of supporting technologies, documentation, and sample projects. Im sorry, but Apple has long taken an elitist attitude, whereas Microsoft has gone out of its way to offer a variety of languages and ample resources to support developers.

The game was tilted in Microsofts favor back when they released Visual Basic. Suddenly anyone could try their hand at Windows development.

You need applications to sell computers and operating systems. I would think that Apple would be giving away its compiler by now.

Martin

Peter:
The 10,000 was kind of my point: It would be trivial to sell those straight-away with little or no effort. I never claimed Frame was cash cow, only that investment in it would be paid for and then some. Not to mention that it would be a positive message to the Mac community who feel Adobe has abandoned them for the Windows platform.

Regarding the tech-writing industry: There is a significant percent who use nothing more than the DTP application, an image editor like Photoshop, and occasionally a vector-type app like Illustrator. (Indeed, many use only Word and PowerPoint!) I've been writing since the 80s, and I used Captivate for one 2-month project in 2003 or so and I used RoboHelp from 2000 to 2001. My customers, big corporations, have legions of writers who produce absolutely nothing but text with a logo in the corner. In the building I'm in at the moment there are about 4000 people and about 200 Frame licenses, and perhaps 10 have anything more beefy than Frame and PowerPoint.

Finally, don't forget that there are plenty of Frame users who are not tech writers. They could be writing financial docs, or scientists writing reports on their laboratory tests who can't stand Word on any platform.

The point is that there is a major market for a reliable Macintosh document application that can put a numbered list where you want it.

Mike, I couldn't agree more. Just look at how deeply you need to dig in the Adobe website to even find out that FrameMaker exists as a product.

It seems to me that translating from a Solaris port to a MacOS port shouldn't be so very difficult -- it's all unix under the hood, right? It must be the user interface issues that are difficult.

Best solution, in my mind, would be to open-source the product and let us all contribute to the ports we want to see. But I don't think Adobe is ready to adopt the open source model quite yet.

--Orisinio

Tim:

Products that a manufacturer sells through distribution-channel resellers are sold for less than the full retail sales price. Unless Adobe sells the 10,000 licenses in your example directly from its Web site, as single copies, so that there are no volume-license discounts, the gross revenue would be less than the $7,500,000. Then, besides the development costs, there are the site-maintenance costs.

IOW, there's less fat on the cash cow than one might guess.

More important, however, is the issue of breaking from Windows. Other current Adobe applications are either Windows-only, or their Macintosh versions lack some important features only available in the Windows version. I'm only aware of those in the Technical Communications Suite (TCS) - RoboHelp 7 and Captivate 3 are Windows-only; Acrobat 8's LiveCycle Designer, and I think some other Acrobat modules, are Windows-only.

Technical writers who need to create help systems, and forms developers who need these tools, currently have no alternate sources for tools like these. The applications in the TCS are efficient because they're integrated smoothly. For this market segment, Windows is the only game at the moment.

I agree that Adobe's neglected marketing FrameMaker well, from the acquisition, and for too long afterwards. That's changed radically with the FM8 release. As much as I'd love a native OS X version of FrameMaker, to be truly useful for the tech-writing industry, the whole TCS family would have to be brought over. It's likely that this much-larger investment is a major factor in what appears to be a FrameMaker-only decision.

Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

I cannot accept the argument that it wouldn't make financial sense. Frame is not a cheap product. Let's say it averaged $750 -- do they not believe that even a mere 10,000 would be sold? That's $7,500,000. Of course there is more expense than the programming team, but I think I could put three programmers in a room with source code, and I'd could pay them a heckuva lot less than $7 million for a Mac & Linux version.

As a matter of fact I would bet dollars to doughnuts that with the right product announcements, Adobe could sell 3000 copies at full $800 retail in one week for $2,400,000

Michael Mueller-Hillebrand: You want to know who cares? As a purchaser of a Mac and one who prefers the OS X-native application, I care a lot. Resorting to virtualization is completely missing the point. I moved away from Windows for a reason, and other than Frame, I'm glad I did.

Glad to see some Mac users still visit this forum :)

Another vote for OSX.

IMO the market share discussion is misleading. Why would Adobe develop the Creative Suite for such a minority OS?

FrameMaker as well as the CS applications are tools for professionals and you will not find any of them on the average office worker's PC.

Ironically it is Apple that made the transition from FM/Mac to FM/Win easy with the change to the Intel platform and the rise of powerful virtualization tools. So, who cares?

Better use your energy to ask for first-class citizen features for FrameMaker (independent of OS): native PDF output, full color support, right-to-left language support,... just to name a few.

- Michael

Or you could assume that porting to an OS that still has less than 10% of the market, is throwing development money away that would be better spend supporting the OSes that have the 90%....

Art

I first started using FrameMaker 1.0 on a Sun Workstation. The product deserved its popularity and was ported to PC and Mac platforms pretty quickly.

I happened to be working at Adobe when they bought Frame Technologies.
In my opinion, Adobe has to this day not realized what they have in FrameMaker. Basically, they have milked it as a cash cow and just keep selling it to people who are committed to using it for legacy reasons. When Apple took so long to produce a serious modern OS (now, thankfully, Mac OS X), Adobe made the decision not to support Macs, and was on the verge of abandoning Macs on their other products as well.

With Apple's rebirth under the second coming of Steve Jobs, Adobe still refuses to port FrameMaker to Mac OS X. I think it's less of a business decision than sheer stubbornness. FrameMaker is a second-class citizen at Adobe, still not well integrated with other Adobe tools, and likely will continue to be that way. Sad.

--Orisinio