Re: FrameMaker's Future

[Art Campbell <art.campbell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan, I really enjoyed your historical post because I've been working
with FM since the 2.0 beta. And I found it everything you said mostly
accurate, although there's one notable omission in your timeline --
shipping the entire FM code base off to Adobe's Indian Centre for
ownership, which (from the outside) seems to have mandated a steep
learning curve for a number of coders "over there" as well as the
disposal of a number of man-years of experience for the Adobe team
that grew the product from version 5 to 7.

As the www.adobeindia.com (which is probably required occasional
monitoring for FM groupies) site explains:

"The India team has complete ownership for the PageMaker and
FrameMaker products and hence handles all phases of the new feature
releases starting from conceptualizing, designing, delivering and
testing for all current and subsequent releases.

In the recent FrameMaker release, exciting new features like the
conditional text and cross referencing in XML known as round tripping
has been introduced - all of it owned by the India team."

Another interesting footnote to FM's off shoring is that the
milestones section for the Indian site doesn't show anything happening
in 2004... which is probably just an oversight; updating a page more
than once every couple years is a heavy burden. But it'd be nice to
know something happened there last year.

Cheers,
Art



On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:36:44 -0800 (PST), Daniel Emory
<danemory7224@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've noticed a number of threads discussing
> FrameMaker's future. Here is my take on it.
> Those who think they can somehow revive FrameMaker
> support for the Mac are living in a dreamworld, which
> should become apparent after they face the realities
> discussed below.
> 
> There are a number of those realities which revolve
> primarily around the absolute necessity, for a product
> like FrameMaker, to rely heavily on successfully
> capturing a large bloc of large license holders. To
> understand the importance of the big licenses holders
> requires a review of FrameMaker's history:
> 
> 1. FrameMaker was created by FrameTechnology in the
> mid-to-late 1980s, thus the core code is nearly 20
> years old. I've been using it since 1990
> 
> 2. By December, 1995, FrameMaker had reached its
> zenith with the initial release of FrameMaker+SGML and
> FrameMaker Version 5.0. At that point, Frame's client
> base consisted mainly of large companies, many of
> which owned thousands of licenses. Despite the massive
> scope of the SGML capability, release 5.0 was
> amazingly stable and bug-and memory-leak-free, proving
> the elegance and adaptability of the original core
> code
> 
> 3. Shortly before the release of Version 5.0,
> FrameTechnology was purchased by Adobe. Within a year
> or so, Adobe had pretty much dismantled the Frame
> Technology organization, eliminated the training and
> customer support groups, and lost most of the Frame
> Technology programmers.
> 
> 4. The first release by Adobe was version 5.5, whose
> main purpose was a failed attempt to capture the Asian
> market by adding double-byte, Rubi and related
> features, plus a half-assed HTML converter. The
> release had more bugs than the movie Starship
> Troopers. It took four releases, culminating with
> release 5.5.6, to make it once again (relatively)
> bug-free and stable. The memory leak problem, however,
> had grown significantly. .
> 
> 5. Although Adobe had declared ambitions in the late
> 90's to carry out a major revamp and modularization of
> the FrameMaker code, nothing ever came of it.
> 
> 6. As a result of the failure to modernize and
> modularize the code, the next two releases, 6 and 7,
> had relatively modest added features, primarily in the
> structured document realm. Although these releases
> were relatively stable, the memory leak problem
> continued to grow---one of many symptoms that the code
> had become intractable. This intractability of the
> code has, quite obviously been the main reason why
> urgently needed new features to fully support XML
> (e.g., schema and Unicode support) have failed to
> materialize. And the ultimate killer App feature, the
> ability to convert an EDD's format rules into XSL
> instances is, apparently, unachievable.
> 
> 7. During the era when Frame Technology owned
> FrameMaker, the company's secret to success was to
> cater to the big companies which owned the vast
> majority of the licenses. Those large companies
> demanded the following things:
> 
> - The power to have a major influence on what new
> features were to be added to each new major release.
> 
> - Heavy participation in Beta testing of each new
> release.
> 
> - Paid Maintenance contracts for each license in
> return for free upgrades and superior (and free)
> customer support via email and phone. In effect, these
> maintenance contracts provided a huge portion of
> advance funding needed for the development of each new
> release.
> 
> - A superior customer training organization which
> provided both training and high-quality training
> materials, giving those companies the option to
> purchase the training materials or to purchase
> training by Frame Technology trainers, both on-site
> and at Frame Technology's headquarters in San Jose.
> 
> - Superior User Manuals which provided users with the
> in-depth details of the product
> 
> Wihin a year or two after Adobe bought Frame
> Technology, Adobe had abandoned and dismantled this
> entire support structure, and had radically degraded
> the usefulness of the User Manual.
> 
> This extreme degradation in the entire support
> structure for FrameMaker explains, more than anything
> else, the rapid growth in the number of subscribers to
> the Framer's Lists. That list has become the
> substitute for what existed before Adobe took over the
> product.
> 
> 8. The combination of what is described in items 6 and
> 7 above began to produce a growing abandonment of
> FrameMaker by the big license holders, which has now
> reached a torrent. This loss of the big license
> holders was the final blow to FrameMaker's future,
> among other reasons because the main source of
> advanced funding of new release development costs has
> been evaporated.
> 
> 9. The advent of high-end XML/Database Content
> Management Systems requires heavy integration of the
> authoring software into that new environment. Adobe
> has done nothing to adapt Framemaker to that
> environment. Arbortext, with its Epic Editor product
> has not made that mistake. It has all the bells,
> whistles and add-ons which allow it to be fully
> integrated into a high-end CMS environment. FrameMaker
> has lost its chance to become the authoring system of
> choice in this environment, which means it can never
> again become the pre-eminent choice of large companies
> requiring thousands of licenses.
> 
> 10. The saddest thing about all this is that a vast
> array of talented aftermarket developers has evolved,
> who produce an incredible array of enhancements to
> FrameMaker capabilities. During Frame Technology's
> reign, it produced a thick annual guide to all of the
> products and services available through those third
> parties which was offered to all license holders.
> Inexplicably, Adobe immediatley abandoned that
> marvelous sales tool, which Frame Technology
> salespeople would invariably use as part of their
> sales pitch to potential customers..
> 
> =====
> Dan Emory & Associates
> FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
> DW Emory <danemory7224@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
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-- 
Art Campbell                                               
art.campbell@xxxxxxxxx
    "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent
                 and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
                             No disclaimers apply.
                                 DoD 358

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