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 | |

 
eWeek analysis of TC Suite
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

12:57 PM Permalink | |

 
How do you say "blunder" in other languages?
posted by Sarah
At STC, MadCap Software announced Lingo, their new "help authoring tool and translation memory system."

Unfortunately, the MadCap booth was in the same row as these guys.

With my limited understanding of trademark law, I don't think this is going to work. You cannot have two companies using the same term to describe two different things in the same industry.

How did this happen? A cursory Google search on lingo translation immediately reveals Lingo Systems. And once you find that, a search of the (free) trademark database will show you that Lingo Systems is already registered as a word mark in "language translation and localization services.

One interesting note, though. Although first used in 1997, the application wasn't made until 2006 and granted on May 1, 2007.

Exquisite timing.

Labels: madcap, trademark

10:37 AM Permalink | |