Pass the popcorn...
posted by Sarah
There's a very polite undeclared blog war going on. Adobe fired the latest opening salvo in a post entitled Welcome Back:

One of the biggest requests that we heard from a small community was a migration path back from Flare to RoboHelp. This community includes those who were early adopters of MadCap Flare and had made a change of the Authoring tool while there were fears of RoboHelp being “Dead”. [...] We found that this community was not growing as the migration had stopped as we succeeded in establishing faith back in RoboHelp by releasing Adobe RoboHelp 6 back in January 2007.

The ostensible point of the blog is to discuss a Flare-to-RoboHelp migration tool developed by John Daigle. But I love the bit about how migration to Flare stopped as soon as Adobe made RoboHelp viable.

And in the MadCap corner, we have Sharon Burton with some corporate history:

3 years ago, MadCap showed at WritersUA. [...] With an old technology base and RoboHELP on its death bed, the demand was there for a new product.

In the last 2 and a smidgen years, we’ve gone from 0% to 25% of the help development tools market. [...]

[P]eople are looking for a way to do more with less. I think our tools do that in a way that no one else’s does. [...]

We also have some product announcements [that will be made at WritersUA]. I’m not saying anything but this is going to upset the competitors in the industry. The stuff we have planned over the next year is going to make your life so much easier.

And there's some detailed stuff about customer retention that follows. I'm betting that's not a coincidence.

Anyway, I don't use either product much -- most of my single sourcing is XML-based and neither product -- despite massive positioning to the contrary from both company -- supports XML content. But the boxing match is highly entertaining.

[I have received complimentary software from both Adobe and MadCap. And, in case it matters, Just Systems. Scriptorium is an Adobe Authorized Training Center. I think those are all the disclaimers needed.]

Labels: adobe, flare, madcap, robohelp

10:05 PM Permalink |