| HN Mirror

I was there, too, from a few months after the founding of Frame, to a year after the acquisition by Adobe nine years later. From the Frame side, it seemed like Adobe figured they were doing a kind of mix of an acqui-hire and putting a place-holder on the FrameMaker customer base, with the notion that in short order they'd be able to move them all over to InDesign by just adding a couple of features (kind of like they managed to do with the PageMaker acquisition).

But in the meetings between the engineering teams, we Frame folks couldn't understand how InDesign's planned extensibility scheme could possibly provide for our feature set; while the InDesign folks didn't seem to grasp what we were even talking about, having never dealt with the kind of features our sorts of customer required (which was understandable, given that they were in nose-to-the-grindstone mode for getting their stuff out the door in the much delayed, and wildly more pressing, effort to compete with Quark Express).

Thus, it wasn't surprising that when Adobe management gave a heads-up to some Fortune-500 (and US Government) customers that they'd be canceling the whole Frame product in deference to InDesign, they were met with some powerful push-back. After all, you can't do the bookshelf-sized technical documentation set for a Boing 767 in a product designed to handle advertising brochures and NYT best-sellers. Bowing to customer pressure, Adobe petulantly reversed their decision, and off-shored development. Indeed, the FrameMaker product lives on until today, and as far as I'm aware, InDesign still doesn't supersede it, even a few decades later (not that it particularly ought to).

So, given that Frame Technology was a public company listed on the NASDAQ, and that Adobe bought it for a modest premium over the going market price, and that the price-to-sales ratio was an unremarkable 5 or so, what's your perspective on how Adobe didn't get a reasonable deal? Seems to me that they just failed to understand the new customer base that they hadn't previously served, and subsequently botched it.