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Subject:Re: Rumor about FrameMaker - is it true? From:"Phillip St. James" <saint0 -at- verizon -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 12 Jan 2005 23:50:24 -0800
Perhaps I'm imagining things here, but are you saying that InDesign already
has more customers and users than Frame has? And I'm "talking out of my
hat" to disagree beforehand with Mr. Neeley's unsubstantiated assertion?
InDesign's market share has never been shown to be greater than
QuarkXPress's by Adobe or any other reputable independent market analyst.
"...XPress, on the other hand, is as much a standard in publishing as
Microsoft Word or Excel in office computing. It has an extremely loyal user
base, and, more importantly, it has proven over and over again that it is a
reliable and efficient production tool, a claim on which InDesign still has
to prove its abilities..." (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-823935.html)
Seriously, most anyone would be able to intuit, interpolate
or extrapolate that InDesign, a relatively new text and graphics editing
title (i.e., 48 months old and 5 months old in its present version) that is
CLEARLY positioned in the marketplace to compete against QuarkXPress and to
replace Adobe's own Aldus PageMaker, could NOT be overtaking FrameMaker in
cumulative or standalone or quarterly sales volume. Adobe FrameMaker is the
undisputed mainstay star spanning almost 20 years in the text editing, book
and manual publishing industry.
Mr. Neeley's criticism makes very little sense to me and I challenge him to
prove
that his contention is true. That is, Mr. Neeley, please PROVE by any means
acceptable in common human reality that InDesign has more actual users or
that
InDesign sells more copies (on its own as a standalone title or even
combined in its CS bundling) than FrameMaker, or that FrameMaker's entire
installed customer base
is smaller than InDesign's standalone or CS-bundle installed customer base.
I'm blind copying some Adobe employees with this post so we can try to get
to the truth here. That said, Adobe never officially tells anyone much
about the sales performance of its product lines unless it must for investor
relations or other legal purposes. Meaning, Adobe does not publish
breakdowns for each of its software titles on its 10-K SEC forms.
So, we may never know with absolute certainty whether InDesign is selling
anywhere near the established customer base that FrameMaker enjoys on its
Unix
(including Linux), PC and Mac OS X and 9x platforms. But the comparative
counts can't be close, Mr. Neeley, especially if simple, critical thinking
is used here.
Again, InDesign is NOT positioned to compete with Frame in ANY way.
InDesign was created to internally replace Adobe PageMaker and to compete
with QuarkXPress and its bevy of wannabes.
InDesign is also still trying to financially recover from a patent
infringement suit lost to Trio, Inc. in 2001. Adobe had to pull InDesign
out of its marketing channels and off all US retail and educational shelves
in late 2001... There's no way to tell how many millions of dollars as well
as market positioning and credibility InDesign lost during that "hiccup."
"Adobe has devoted considerable effort to this new product, which it claims
is the first new page layout program in more than a decade to be designed
from the ground up. The company appears quite confident that InDesign will
allow Adobe to capture some market share from QuarkXPress and others going
forward."
Does Mr. Neeley actually think and openly proclaim that ADOBE FrameMaker is
Adobe's
target and that InDesign is outselling FrameMaker either incrementally or in
total units over the years? Amazing...
BTW, InDesign's version 1.0 Adobe Classroom in a Book wasn't released until
November 1999. In Design 1.0 (though 2.5) was NOT bundled with other Adobe
products and is NOTHING like the current version of InDesign 3.0/CS-Creative
Suite. During the same period FrameMaker has remained essentially the same
very solid application - no frills and sadly no attentive marketing programs
or significant new features. And oddly, InDesign still does not import much
of FrameMaker's output. Hmmm...
Obviously, Adobe is doing great - magnificent really. Adobe just reported a
$430
million revenue fourth quarter; a 29% increase over the same 2003 fourth
quarter. Adobe says that this revenue increase came from a combination of
Acrobat and Creative Suite (CS) sales. Note that CS now INCLUDES InDesign.
Just how many units InDesign is garnering on its own is murky at best. But
perhaps Mr. Neeley can tell us all what these numbers are with crystal
clarity and
pin-point accuracy.
The professional graphics design community has been lukewarm at best in its
InDesign reviews. They don't say that InDesign is bad or inferior. But
they frequently
say that InDesign is no improvement over QuarkXPress either in performance
or price. Learning to deftly use a new app takes time that these graphics
design
users are also unwilling to devote to InDesign - because they would be
jeopardizing
their jobs in their fast-paced, deadline driven work environment. Now
that InDesign is CS-bundled, at least the pricing criticism has been
somewhat
muffled.
But how does anyone know whether CS bundle buyers are actually using
InDesign?
Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign make up the standard CS bundle for
$1000 retail. Add Acrobat 7.0 Professional and GoLive to the premium CS
bundle and pay $1300 retail. Not bad really. By itself, InDesign costs
$700 retail.
QuarkXPress currently costs $945 if bought from Quark's online store and
directly downloaded. Note that InDesign and QuarkXPress often require a
number of fairly expensive plug-ins to be truly flexible and thoroughly
functional. The best XML plug-ins for each application are VERY expensive.
Some XML add-ons for Quark are in the astronomical price range...
On the other hand, here's a blog criticizing QuarkXPress:
Finally, here is what most tech writers are wondering about: how does Word
stack up against FrameMaker, Word Perfect and LaTeX? Has anyone tried Nisus
Writer on the Mac? ;-)
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Neeley" <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 5:02 PM
Subject: Re: Rumor about FrameMaker - is it true?
...I am not at all sure that Phillip isn't talking through his hat on the
numbers of users, though, since InDesign is rapidly becoming the tool
of choice for doing tasks that have previously been the province of
Quark Express. In fact, InDesign was originally targeted to be a
"Quark Killer" and, as of version 2.0 and later, it seems to have
become so...
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