A Technical Writing Suite From Adobe?

Look inside my FrameMaker crystal ball. Can you see what I see? It’s a bit foggy, but if you concentrate for just a minute, an amazing new product will come into focus. It’s a technical writers dream come true—an all-in-one suite of Adobe software—FrameMaker, Acrobat 3D, RoboHelp, and Captivate in the same box. A combination product similar to the tightly integrated and wildly popular Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, and Acrobat) used by design professionals around the globe.

Crazy, you say? Perhaps, but more likely to become a reality than MadCap Flare dominating the help authoring tool space.

Now that Adobe owns Macromedia’s considerable product assets, in particular Flash—an advanced authoring environment for creating interactive websites, digital experiences and mobile content—it is better positioned than any other software company to dominate the technical content creation and delivery market. Hundreds of thousands of technical writers and engineers swear by Adobe FrameMaker. They are dedicated, loyal bunch who are more-often-than-not unwilling to switch. They like Adobe products and are familiar with how they work. What they really want is an integrated tool set—one that allows them to create, manage, and deliver content without the need to jump through content conversion hoops.

Of course, I could be wrong. I had earlier advised my readers to “buy the professional version of Quadralay WebWorks Publisher and start thinking about how you�re going to dazzle your clients with the structured XML content you create in FrameMaker and glorify and make more useful in WebWorks. “ I was wrong about that. My crystal ball was in for repair that week. LOL

While Adobe certainly didn’t buy Macromedia to obtain RoboHelp, now that they own it and have continued to support its development, it actually has more than a good shot at continuing to dominate the help authoring tool market, but this time with a little help from Adobe. Quadralay on the other hand, seems to be heading in a different direction, although it’s not entirely clear which direction that is.

Pundits may disagree. Hey, that’s what they do. But my money is still on Adobe cranking out a new generation of technical writing tools that will strengthen their position as a leader in the tech comm space. After all, it’s far more profitable to sell products to existing customers than to chase down and convert new ones.

For those of you who are still upset about Adobe dropping support for the Macintosh, you might recall an earlier post I made in which I predicted that Adobe FrameMaker would one day run on Intel-based Macintosh computers. Well, as it turns out, I was right about that. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen confirmed my prediction at a press conference in Tokyo last week during which he told reporters how Adobe was preparing new releases of their products to run on both PowerPC and MacIntel computers utilizing the Universal Binary format that Apple is encouraging software makers to use. Chizen told CIO magazine that although “there are some products that we have today that we have not been able to afford to continue to develop to make available on the Mac�a great example being FrameMaker. The majority of FrameMaker users use Windows as an OS, but there is a small percentage that want to use FrameMaker on the Mac so they can use Boot Camp.”

Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP on a Mac and run Windows applications like FrameMaker as if you were running them on a Windows-based PC.

So, keep an eye on Adobe. I predict a new Adobe technical writing suite of tools is in your future.