Palimpsest: eWeek analysis of TC Suite

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Palimpsest

eWeek analysis of TC Suite

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 — posted by Sarah

They misspelled Michael Hu's name, so minus points for sloppiness.

Introducing: Adobe's Software for the Technical Writer (eWeek)

I have some issues with this article. For instance:

The lead-in: "Determined to earn revenues beyond the Web developer market, Adobe Sept. 25 released its Technical Communication Suite [...]." Hmmm. Creative Suite is for web developers? Acrobat?
"The new suite comes almost as an afterthought to the company's Flash, Flex and the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime, formerly code-named Apollo) Web development technologies, whose futures were discussed Sept. 20 at the FlashForward conference in Boston." That's just a weird editorial comment. Creative Suite 3 was released this spring, so was Flash/Flex/AIR an afterthought to CS3? Different release cycles do not necessarily equal "afterthought." Also, I don't think the audience for FFA and for TC Suite have much (if any) overlap.

I think the addition of support for Flash into Acrobat is important -- it will allow us to create much more interactive PDF files. But I'm afraid that I'm not quite on-board with the hyperbole from Adobe (sorry, Mike)?

"We're going to change the dynamics of this industry and change how people are creating content and change how people consume this content," Wu [sic] said.

Here is the unauthorized translation:

This TC Suite is going to hurt our competitors, who are all providing point solutions. Even if you concede that, for example, Flare might be better than RoboHelp, when we put FrameMaker and RoboHelp in a single box with an attractive price point, it makes purchasing FrameMaker and Flare separately less appealing.

ePublisher Pro's integration with FrameMaker is probably better than RoboHelp's, at least for now, but licensing RoboHelp as part of the Suite is going to be much easier than justifying two separate purchases.

If we can piggy-back Captivate onto the big authoring tools (FrameMaker and RoboHelp), we'll get incremental revenue from people who might have otherwise not bothered with buying a simulation tool.

In short, the losers are going to be:

MadCap, which makes Flare (RoboHelp competitor), Mimic (Captivate competitor), and, someday, Blaze (alleged FrameMaker competitor).
Quadralay, which makes ePublisher Pro (conversion tool for FrameMaker to HTML, sort-of RoboHelp competitor)
Qarbon, which makes Viewlet Builder (Captivate competitor)
TechSmith, which makes Camtasia (Captivate competitor)

Lots of Captivate competition on that list. Makes you wonder if this is really about Flash and Acrobat, rather than FrameMaker/RoboHelp integration.

And one other random note: MadCap already has a suite called MadPak, which includes Flare (help authoring), Mimic (simulation), Capture (screen captures), and Echo (audio). No great print solution, though.

Labels: FrameMaker, madcap, robohelp, TechComm Suite