Re: Competing with Word

[Michael Richards <michaelr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hedley_S_Finger@allegiance.com.au wrote lots of stuff:
> >
> > Dal and all:
> >
> > >
> >

<snipped stuff on why people don't purchase Frame>

> ........ perceived steep learning curve
> > by
> > >non-users.

<snip snip snip>

Look, all this has a familiar ring to it. I was working for the Australian Adobe
& Aldus distributor when Photoshop first came out in version 1.0. At that time
Photoshop was perceived by my boss as being a very low volume product and would
never crack the mainstream.

How wrong. But talking to some of the Adobe people who would every so often visit
the Antipodes, there was a definite marketing strategy going on with Photoshop.
This had two prongs.

1) bundling the product with as many scanner manufacturers as they could get on
board. (I wonder what blandishments Adobe used?  Any resemblance to the Olympics
........)

2) Deliberately not documenting the interesting bits of the user interface so the
the Graphics Arts Community (always at the time referred to in hushed capitals)
could discover these and pass them around as esoteric guru-disciple fodder.

These worked. Illustrator came earlier and so didn't need this cachet, these
frisson-inducing hidden secrets.

Many of the people with Adobe at the time are no longer there (I suspect).

COULD A SIMILAR
STRATEGY BE THE REASON WHY THEY TOOK SO MUCH OUT OF THE FRAME MANUALS AT 5.5.x?

E'en now, you would be shocked how much is still in Photoshop that you never
suspected was there! Trust me.

And now, the good news (this is where Frame comes in, folks!):

We old Photoshop hands remember the terrible time when Photoshop migrated to
version 2.5. This, although numbered as if a minor upgrade, was actually a
complete rewrite in C++ (or whatever) to allow for cross-platform compatibility.
It was a bug-ridden disaster of the first magnitude. The fixes came thick and
fast and good old Photoshop is now pretty stable -- especially in comparison to
one of the older versions.

The Moral? Well, I surmise that Adobe have been mucking around with the Frame
code, which is why we've all had to suffer. They may even have done a major
rewrite a la Photoshop 2.5 (which as I remember didn't look much different from
its immediate predecessor). But, Yeah, Verily, all will come right in version
6.0.1.

Here endeth the lesson. No doubt someone will read from the Lamentations of
Jerremiah in a future Framers sermon.

Oh, in case I forget ---     :-)

--
             _   _        Michael Richards
            ( \ / )       Email:  michaelr@ind.tansu.com.au
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