FM for Mac: Write to Adobe

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxxxxx>]

*** This message is only posted to Free Framers (framers@xxxxxxxxx).
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Since the news that FM will be discontinued on the Macintosh platform, it
has been suggested that Mac users should make their dissatisfaction known
to Adobe. Believe it or not, this *may* make a difference. Read the
following messages from Adobe's FM User-to-user forum and make your move.

You should always send your comments *directly* to Adobe, and not only
to one of the public FM forums on the Internet, or your Adobe re-seller.
And please: DO *NOT* SEND YOUR COMMENTS AS REPLIES TO THIS MESSAGE!

The first message tells you why you should still care, and the second
message gives an example of what to write and a postal address.


===============================================================================
Frame for Mac: Write to Adobe
Tim Murray - 07:13pm Mar 24, 2004 Pacific

I spoke to a support staffer today about a Frame Windows issue (I found a new
bug) and brought up the Mac. He said that Adobe is monitoring the posts they get
to their product feature request page <http://www.adobe.com/support/feature.html>
and that while it's not likely that Adobe will change their position on Frame
for Macintosh, it's not impossible, either. I mentioned that I thought the link
was not for commentary but was for specific ideas, and he said, no, please
write, we're listening.

So, to that end, I'm asking the people at my local Frame user's group and those
I know in the Society for Technical Communication to write to Adobe.

You could run through the posts here and find issues to address, such as Mac
sales have been bad because we've been waiting for OS X, that kind of thing.

Hey, it's worth a few clicks, right? You have nothing to lose but your Windows.

Tim Murray
TechKnowledge Corporation

P.S.: Letters on paper work well, too.


===============================================================================
Frame for Mac: Write to Adobe
Jim Royal - 02:09pm Mar 25, 2004 Pacific

I sent the following letter by post yesterday. You may want to send a similar
letter to Mr. Chizen.

Bruce Chizen
President and Chief Executive Officer
Adobe Systems Incorporated
345 Park Avenue
San Jose, California 95110-2704
USA

Dear Mr. Chizen.

This morning, I learned that Adobe has cancelled FrameMaker for Macintosh.
I wish to express my utter frustration and disappointment with your management
team for their handling of this product, and for leaving customers such as
myself with no migration path away from it now that it no longer exists.

FrameMaker seems to have suffered from a kind of benign neglect ever since
Adobe purchased it from Frame Technology in 1995. I remember the expectation
I had that Adobe would do great things with FrameMaker, an application that
had an antiquated user interface even by the standards of the day. But aside
from improving integration with Adobe's own Acrobat product, FrameMaker 7 was
essentially the same application as was FrameMaker 4, which was the first
version of the product that I used.

Today, thanks to Adobe's neglect of FrameMaker, I am left high and dry on a
sandbar, waiting for the tide to come and wash me away. I have thousands of
FrameMaker documents and no migration path for them. Adobe does not make a
single other product that can read either FrameMaker or MIF interchange files.

Now, I understand the business reasons for making this decision. Products must
make money. The fact that FrameMaker 7 still has a 1990-era user interface
speaks volumes about Adobe's unwillingness to spend money on the application.
And thus an update of FrameMaker for Mac OS X may have been too much to hope for.

So if the cancellation of FrameMaker was foreseeable, then where is my
migration path? InDesign has inherited a few of the long-document processing
features of FrameMaker. So where is the MIF translation plugin? Give InDesign
support for MIF, user-defined variables, and conditional text, and I'll happily
make the switch.

Your management team's handling of FrameMaker has been poor for years. There
have been so many rumors of FrameMaker's cancellation that longtime users
considered it a running joke. Well now that it is no longer a joke, the
mishandling continues, leaving customers such as myself with nowhere to go.

Yours in aggravation,

Jim Royal

===============================================================================


Again, replying and sending your comments to me or to the framers mailing
list(s) has no effect whatsoever. You need to address Adobe directly.

___________________________________________
Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Communicator, Uppsala, Sweden
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@xxxxxxxxx
http://go.to/framers/
___________________________________________

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