Re: Re[2]: InDesign and Frame

[jeremy@xxxxxxxxx (Jeremy H. Griffith)]

On Sat, 13 Mar 1999 10:03:04 +0000, Roger Jones <Roger.Jones@rjpc.demon.co.uk>
wrote:

>At 08:44 12/03/99 +0300, Dmitri Yunov wrote:
>>FrameMaker is "alien" product for Adobe. Don't forget it!
>
>And Word for Word was dead just months after its acquisition by Adobe.

I can't fault Adobe for that decision.  Word-for-Word was the MasterSoft
product, and MasterSoft was purchased for it by Frame Technology before
Adobe bought Frame.  It was bad *then*, having only one virtue: buying
the company was the very cheapest way FTC could add lots of formats to
their list for marketing purposes.  I was involved in the negotiations
at the time via another conversion provider, which had a far better
product (I wrote half of it) ... but wanted more money.  It became all
too clear that conversion quality was not even a minor consideration
in FTC's decision-making process...

Again, this was FTC management, *not* Adobe, that made that decision.
When Adobe found itself with an ugly mess on its hands, it did the
sensible and honorable thing, and sold it to Inso, MasterSoft's former 
main competitor, who promptly buried it.  Sadly, the legacy lives on 
in FM's filters; look in maker.ini for the ones marked "AW4W" to see 
which ones are best avoided...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
   (jeremy@omsys.com)     http://www.omsys.com/
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