Adobe Systems Inc. on Tuesday will inform FrameMaker users that the company will discontinue FrameMaker for Macintosh next month. The decision to stop FrameMaker development will not come as a surprise to most users; Adobe last updated FrameMaker for the Mac almost two years ago when FrameMaker 7 was released. FrameMaker for Windows and Solaris will continue to be developed, according to the company.
“On April 21 2004, Adobe will be discontinuing FrameMaker for the Macintosh,” Tony Yun, product manager for Adobe FrameMaker, told MacCentral. “Adobe FrameMaker 7.1 was released earlier this year for Windows and Solaris and will continue to be available on those platforms. For Mac users, complimentary and fee-based technical support for FrameMaker will be available for approximately one year from the discontinuation date.”
Karl Matthews, group product manager for FrameMaker explained that it came down to market conditions and the trends that Adobe was noticing with its FrameMaker customers.
“We have seen the Windows platform in particular become a larger and larger share of the FrameMaker sales — from a business perspective we can see that is the direction for the product,” said Matthews. “We have had some customers request an OS X version of FrameMaker, but it’s really hard to justify on a business level.”
FrameMaker isn’t the first application that Adobe has discontinued ongoing development for this year. Just before the start of Macworld Expo San Francisco in January, Adobe announced that PageMaker would no longer be developed. However, Adobe gave PageMaker customers a way to upgrade to InDesign and keep the workflow of PageMaker with the introduction of the PageMaker Plug-in Pack.
Jo Ann Buckner, Senior Product Manager and Paul Kim, Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, explained to MacCentral that the features PageMaker customers were looking for in a new version were already available as part of the Adobe InDesign CS. The PageMaker Plug-in Pack for Adobe InDesign gave users a comfortable workflow and addressed the investment people had made in PageMaker.
FrameMaker users are not being offered a similar package from Adobe.
“At this time, we are not announcing any plans relating to functionality that may be coming in future versions of InDesign,” said Matthews. “Some FrameMaker users may choose to move to InDesign after they hear this news, and for some of those users that would be a very good choice.”