| They got permission from Corfield to use the prototype
as a demoware for their computers, and hence, the primitive FrameMaker received plenty of
exposure in the Unix workstation arena. Steve
Kirsch saw the demo and realized the potential of the product.
Kirsch used the money he earned from Mouse Systems to
fund a startup company, Frame Technology Corp., to commercialize the software.
Popular technical writing tool
Originally written for SunOS (a variant of UNIX) on Sun 3
machines, FrameMaker was a popular technical writing tool, and the
company was profitable early on. Due to the flourishing desktop publishing market on the
Apple Macintosh, the software was ported to the Mac as the second platform.
In the early 1990s, a wave of UNIX workstation vendors -
Sony, Motorola, Data General, MIPS, and Apollo - provided funding to Frame Technology for
an OEM version for their platforms.
At the height of its success, FrameMaker ran on
more than thirteen UNIX platforms including NeXT Computer's NeXTSTEP and IBM's AIX
operating systems. The NeXT and AIX version of FrameMaker used Display PostScript
technology while all other UNIX versions used the X Window System-Motif windowing
environment.
Sun Microsystems and AT&T tried to push the OpenLook
GUI standards to win over Motif, so Sun contracted Frame Technology to implement a version
of FrameMaker on their PostScript-based NeWS windowing system. The NeWS version of
FrameMaker was successfully released to NSA, which was among the first few customers
adopting the OpenLook standards.
Frame Technology later ported FrameMaker to Microsoft
Windows, but the company lost direction soon after its release. Up to this point,
FrameMaker had been targetting a professional market for highly technical publications,
such as the maintenance manuals for the Boeing 777 project, and licensed each copy for
$2,500. But the Windows version brought the product to the $500 price range which
cannibalized its own non-Windows customer base.
The company's attempt to sell sophisticated
technical publishing software to the home DTP market was a disaster. A tool
designed for a 1000 page manual was too cumbersome and difficult for an average home user
to type a one page letter.
Sales plummeted and brought the company to the verge of
bankruptcy. After several rounds of layoffs, the company was stripped to the bare bones.
Adobe Systems acquired the product and returned the focus
to the professional market. Today, Adobe FrameMaker is still a widely used publication
tool for technical writers.
Major competitors
There were several major competitors in the technical
publishing market such as Interleaf etc. None of those products survived the influence of
Microsoft Word except FrameMaker.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free
Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Adobe
Framemaker.
Your Thoughts?
What are your thoughts on this? Drop me a line at ivan
at klariti dot com |
I'm Ivan Walsh, the person behind this site. I help people improve how they write, publish and extend their business assets.