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Monday, April 18, 2005 |
All of you bloggers who got into this daily drudgery just for the sheer
hipness of it, it's seriously way beyond time to move on to the Next
Next Big Thing. For this very morning, in newspapers across this great
land, Little Billy of The Family Circus announces that he is going outside "to gather information for my neighborhood blog."
Note that the link will not display this particular cartoon for another
two weeks. King Features decrees. In the meantime, if you live in a
town without a daily newspaper that carries this fine feature (and
surely there's got to be one somewhere, though I've never been able to
escape it), you're just going to have to take my word on it.
4:41:26 PM 
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When I woke up this morning, I turned on NPR to hear Marketplace
report that Adobe had acquired Macromedia. The rest of the world
immediately thought (if they thought anything at all) "Oh,
Acrobat and Dreamweaver (or Flash)." True enough, but in my little
corner of the industry, many probably thought what I did: "Oh,
FrameMaker and RoboHelp."
This goes to show how close I've been to the tech-writing community of late. Now I didn't expect the merger press release
to mention either project, and in that I was right. In the course
of the day, though, I learned that, well, for the most part, both
products may have been entirely abandoned. Now, FrameMaker has
basically been rumored to be on its deathbed for longer than I've used
it. But RoboHelp has generally suffered from too many releases, not too
few, at least when I was writing docs full-time. But since acquiring
the eHelp Corporation a year or so ago, Macromedia has apparently not
released a single version of RoboHelp.
Finally, at the WritersUA
Conference in Las Vegas in March, Macromedia didn't show up at their
booth, and Michael Hamilton, the well-known (if not always well-liked)
RoboHelp Product Manager, came representing a new company. Oddly, a gaming site blogged the news that RoboHelp was (perhaps) end-of-lifed. This sparked much community discussion, to where a Macromedia representative was sent out with an official comment on the RoboHelp forum.
The promise was that RoboHelp was still "sold and supported," but on
the question of "development" there was silence. It's a fun thread.
Theoretically, as Keith Soltys
reminds us, Adobe could now revive both FrameMaker and RoboHelp as the
Adobe Creative Documentation Suite, but you'd probably be waiting quite
some time for that release.
Meanwhile, in case you haven't seen the news, here are some links:
Bloomberg News: Standard business story
InternetNews.com has a Microsoft angle.
An Irish spin from SiliconRepublic
One more link:
A most interesting historical analysis of the deal, from ZDNet. Thanks to cf.Objective.
3:47:22 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Mike McCallister.
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