Re: Adobe's survey -- mac users take note

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

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From: "Debbi Fortney Correia" <debbi.fortney@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Graeme Forbes wrote:
> > I wonder what the behind-the-scenes story is about the decision to do 
> > this survey? Are they having second thoughts about just letting fm 
> > fade away?
>
> I don't want to start any rumors, give anyone the wrong idea, or to even
> hint at a demise of FrameMaker, but did anyone else who took the survey
> get the feeling that Adobe is trying to figure out which features they
> would have to add to InDesign to get FrameMaker users to convert?

I'm still waiting for a reply to my request for the survey, so I
haven't seen the survey yet, but here is one thing to consider:

FM 7.0 was released in May, 2002, and FM 7.1 in January, 2004.
In late 2002, all major FM development was moved to Adobe India.
If they are working on a FM 8 version, that work must be well on
its way by now and there is very little chance any user requests
at this time could influence an ongoing major release of FM.
It does take a couple of years to prioritize feature requests,
allocate resources, and then produce and test the code.

Therefore, the survey is either collecting requests for the FM
release following FM 8, to be released perhaps in 2007/2008,
or they are indeed working on an InDesign cross-grade.
At this time, seeing how Adobe is letting FM slowly die, I would
be very surprised if Adobe was making any plans for FM itself
further ahead than the next FM 8 release.

It's great that Adobe does this, and I'm eager to participate,
but the timing does seem a bit odd in the product release cycle.
Unless Adobe India has spent the time so far rewriting the FM
core code, are starting from scratch and want to reconsider all
user requests for an upcoming FM 8 release in 2006 -- who knows?


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