Adobe: Framemaker not a “core product” but will live on anyway
Shantanu Narayen on Adobe’s Future Direction: Product Strategy for the Next Generation of the Web
Narayen is president and COO of Adobe, and spoke to the Wharton School’s Knowledge@Wharton newsletter about the company’s long-term product plans. In passing, they touched on the future of Framemaker, as the tool that addresses creators of book-length documents.
Knowledge@Wharton: In terms of your current offerings, Adobe appears to be supporting a number of overlapping products. You have Dreamweaver along with GoLive. You have both Fireworks and Illustrator; Photoshop and ImageReady. Is it a challenge to support such a broad spectrum of products, many of which have similar or overlapping features?
Narayen: Each of the products you’ve mentioned — and there are others such as InDesign and FrameMaker and PageMaker — have a very broad spectrum of customers, with features available in certain products that are not available in other products in that genre.
Let’s take the professional page layout market, for example. While InDesign is the center of focus, the features to do large document publishing and XML publishing are more advanced in FrameMaker. So we expect our customers to use FrameMaker for that purpose.
Similarly, FreeHand allows the ability to do multiple page composition for vectors that Illustrator doesn’t support. Each of those products has achieved a certain amount of success by having key features that appeal to certain customers. Clearly, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver appeal to the broadest spectrum of customers, and that’s where we’ve put in the most focus. But we will continue to support all those other products.
Knowledge@Wharton: So you see these products having a niche of their own, rather than consolidating them by adding the good features of the others onto the core product?
Narayen: We will continue to extend the capabilities of the core product in each of those segments with some of the features that are available in the other products. But, yes, it is our goal to continue to make sure that we don’t leave any customer behind. For a number of customers who have adopted a product like FrameMaker, we will continue to invest in it.
Sounds like those who want to look at life after Adobe will have some time, at least, during which their needs for new capabilities will be met, more or less. I would however be betting on Madcap, myself, as the company that will do most to serve the market that Framemaker was in. This isn’t a slam at Adobe, in any way– I think it makes perfect sense to go where the large market is. Adobe has bigger fish to fry than Framemaker, long term.
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