O Adobe, Adobe! What a heartbreak company you are!

[Hedley Finger <hedley.finger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fellow Framers:

Yesterday I received a neat little marketing reference from Adobe
Systems Pty Ltd, Australia, called the Big Red Folder.  It's an
approximately A5-sized ring binder containing one card for (almost) each
of Adobe's publishing, printing, and graphics arts products.

Guess which major product line optimized for producing and publishing
long multi-chapter books is not included?

Why do they continually do this?  I taxed an Adobe person about the
persistent failure to include FrameMaker in their product-line
promotions and received the answer that FrameMaker addresses a
completely different market (from what other markets?).  But this weenie
couldn't tell me what this other market was or really what markets were
addressed by the other products.  He clearly was echoing some kind of
internal market-segmentation bumf without really understanding who
constituted the various markets.  

There is some kind of corporate culture that assumes that FrameMaker is
only used by propeller-cap technical-writing nerds like you and me, and
that we live in a PhotoShop- and Illustrator- free ghetto.

The fact is that at this corporation (I speak from observation, not on
their behalf), FrameMaker is the cross-platform product mandated for
producing internal technical documents and end-user documentation, that
is books.   The technical writers also use Photoshop and Illustrator. 
The marketing people use GoLive! and Photoshop, and a page layout
program, possibly Quark Xpress, to produce everything else.

But I also know that a number of commercial book publishers like
Jacaranda Wiley and HarperCollins, and many university presses use
FrameMaker -- alongside InDesign, PageMaker, and Xpress -- to produce
long books, course handbooks, learned works, and so on.  Is the
marketing strategy to remain silent on FrameMaker for these markets lest
the impact of the Quark-killing InDesign thrust be diluted?  This seems
strange when Adobe's Web site itself promotes a large book publisher who
uses FrameMaker.  Why isn't there a Publishing Pack that includes BOTH
InDesign and FrameMaker?  Or alternative Publishing Packs?

Are the marketing people frightened that any admission that another
Adobe product might be better for SOME publishing tasks than InDesign
will somehow harm the perception of that product in the marketplace? 
God knows FM is terribly deficient in layout and prepress -- for one
thing, why can't we lay out pages in double-spreads, with landscape
illustrations and tables across two FACING pages?

Why does Adobe continually leave FrameMaker pitted against Word as
though they are in the same market?  There are so many markets where
neither Word nor InDesign are appropriate.  Or is this yet another case
of a product being taken over by a corporate culture, historically
aligned with the <prejudice> pony-tailed yuppie graphic-designer set
</prejudice>, unable to come to grips with it and from that point it
slowly languishes and dies.  Symantec have been quite good at killing
acquisitions by benign neglect.

Or is this a case of predicting the future by examining the past?  Fact:
few graphic designers in book publishing use FrameMaker.  Ergo: graphic
designers  will never buy FrameMaker.  Imagine if Edwin Land had
surveyed the market for instant cameras before marketing the Polaroid
camera and film.  Amongst professional portrait photographers, there was
no-one using instant cameras. Newspaper and magazine photographers
similarly did not use instant cameras.  Scientific, technical, and
astronomical photographers did not use instant cameras either.  And
instant cameras were totally unknown among amateur and home
photographers.  Ergo: there was no market for instant cameras.

-- 
Regards,
Hedley Finger   Technical Writer

[FrameMaker 5.5.6, Acrobat 3.02, Windows 98, HP OmniBook 2100]

SUBSCRIBE TO THE ALTERNATIVE FRAMERS LIST
Message must consist of only this text (no signature, etc.): 
     subscribe framers <your@preferred.mail.address>
     help
     end
Send above message to: 
<mailto:majordomo@omsys.com?Subject=subscribe%20framers>

Ericsson Australia Pty Ltd
Tel. +61 3 9301 6214   Cell. +61 412 461 558   Fax. +61 3 9301 6199
Email. hedley.finger@ericsson.com.au

Hand Holding Projects Pty Ltd
Tel. +61 3 9809 1229   Cell. +61 412 461 558   Fax. +61 3 9809 1326
Email. hfinger@handholding.com.au

** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **