Rage Maker: Fuck Adobe

04Feb08

Framemaker is, arguably, the best application for producing voluminous documentation on the market. Anybody that argues that Microsoft Word is even remotely capable of handling documents more than 30 pages long is either an idiot, a masochist, or both.

The Company has been using Framemaker for all of our manuals for more than 10 years, all the way back to the good (?) ol’ NeXTSTEP days. We’ve paid for new licenses and upgrades as required throughout the years. Attempts were made (against my advice) to do one of our larger manuals in MS Word. That attempt failed miserably, and we paid a nice chunk of cash to a 3rd-party vendor to convert it back to Framemaker.

Unfortunately, our years-long romance with this powerful software may soon come to an end. In a blog post from Feb. 2007, Framemaker’s Product Manager states:

Adobe discontinued FrameMaker software for the Apple Macintosh operating system on April 21, 2004. The decision to discontinue FrameMaker on the Macintosh operating systems was based on the market conditions for FrameMaker.

This after having declared in a previous post that:

Let me assure you, as the Product Manager of FrameMaker, that FrameMaker is here to stay.

A number of events precipitated the demise of Framemaker on Mac machines, and without going into too much detail, they are:
1. The release of Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001
2. The existence of the “Classic” environment therein
3. Adobe’s porting of Photoshop and Illustrator in late 2003
4. Adobe’s “market conditions” preclude porting Framemaker to OS X
5. Apple’s announced intent to move to Intel processors in 2005
6. The extinction of the “Classic” environment therewith
7. Apple stops shipping PowerPC-based Macs in 2006

I will not attempt to pin the injustice of losing Framemaker-on-a-Mac on either company. But… Aseem Dokania’s hubris in response to Mac users’ comments is personally-infuriating, and belies his knowledge of a customer base that has been loyal to–and perhaps buttressed for lengths of time–the company for which he now works.

… I believe there are some good workarounds available now for using windows applications on Mac. It may be possible to use one of them for FrameMaker.

Fuck you, Aseem.

Update: Apparently Aseem is no longer the PM for FM. It’s now Mahesh Kumar Gupta. Bring it back to Mac, Mahesh! If not, you may be told to go fuck yourself. You have been warned.

Filed under: Bitchin' & Moanin', Design, Mac   |  1 Comment