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FrameMaker & Word: What will their union produce?
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By: Bill Holtsnider
Now that Mama Frame and Papa Word are getting married, I think it is a good time to speculate on what their offspring will look like. The union itself was announced by press release (http://tinyurl.com/6vovr), the PR vehicle of choice for weddings ranging from Britney Spears to Prince Charles. (Technically, software does not get "married"; it gets "co-developed". But you know what I mean.)
The first question is: "What will they call their progeny?" Thanks to that pesky Internet, all of the good names are taken. The most obvious choice is WordPro, for "Word Professional". This name would distinguish it from its father, "Microsoft Word". (It would imply that this program has Power, and Strength and perhaps Accomplishment, characteristics one does not associate with Mere Word.}
Alas, "Word Pro" has already been taken. It was nabbed a long time ago by Lotus (who was, in turn, nabbed by IBM).
For fun, let's call the little fellow "WP2".
"What will little WP2 look like?" you ask. There are some features we can guess at. Cost: I suspect WP2 will go out the door for somewhere between $500 - $750 a license. Papa Word has run between $75 and $150, depending on who else gets in the shopping basket with him. Mama Frame has run $600 - $800, depending on how popular the product is at the time, for the PC version. The Mac version of Frame died last year; the UNIX version is more than twice the PC price.
Will WP2 run in UNIX? There are product managers in Redmond pondering that very question right now. My guess is that yes, WP2 will be truly cross-platformal, a feature that drove many FrameMaker sales through the nineties. At one point you could only run your Mac Word files on a PC if you knew the disk formatting game; Frame files could run on PCs, Macs and UNIX boxes. That was cool.
Speaking of features, how long will it take you to get up to speed on WP2? An almost flat learning curve has been Papa Word's greatest feature: you can process some words very quickly. They will probably be not all that useful or readable, but they will be processed. FrameMaker, on the other hand, has you burrowing in your closet for your carabineers (mountain-climbing gear). There is a steep learning curve; you gotta learn stuff to make Frame work. FrameMaker gives you a whole lot, but asks for a whole lot in return. (Actually, it asks for a whole lot in advance.)
WP2 will probably be the classic combination (designed by committee): neither easy enough to use right away but not worth the effort to find the obscure feature you need. It'll take hours to generate a simple, one page CYA memo but after a week of searching, you'll discover it will let you create individual TOCs for each chapter but they can only be in single columns…
Will WP2 correct generational failings? Will it allow you to create TOCs across multiple files, for example? ("Master Documents" in Word do not work in the real world. Performing tasks like this in Frame, on the other hand, is a piece of cake.)
Will it have Word's famed Outlining feature? (You can create an outline in Frame with some work; in Word, it is a thing of beauty, seamlessly integrated into the entire program. It is amazing what that feature can do.) I bet WP2 can do what Master Documents claims to do and what Frame really does, and it will also have Outlining.
What about MIF files - will WP2 have those? I hope so - I use them all the time when I use Frame. (MIF files let you see the guts of a document file, so you can make quasi-programmatic changes. (Think command-line power. You don't realize what a small percentage of the total document you are working with until you see a MIF file.) I suspect a WP2 file will have MIF files, but it will look like a Word file saved as "HTML"; there is so much extra Microsoft stuff in there, you might as well have just gone for the .txt version…
What about file capacity? How big can a WP2 file expected to be? I always act as if 500 pages and 5 mg is about a much a burden as I should be asking a single Papa Word file to carry. (Files have crashed Word with much smaller specs, of course, but in general, those are the numbers I use.) FrameMaker may have a size constraint, but I have never encountered one. (And I go up pretty high; I have done multi-volume reference manuals in the 100's of pages, with files over 10 mg, etc.) I will guess that WP2's file capacity will be large. Not FrameMaker large, but very large.
Backward compatibility is another key issue. Word has been excellent at it over the years, Frame just OK. (For many versions, I could go back into an earlier version of Word and come back into the latest version; with Frame, it was generally a one-way proposition.) I suspect WP2 will read Papa Word and Mama Frame files, and it will write Word- and Frame-compatible files, but once you create a WP2 file with certain features, going backwards will be impossible. Papa Word will never know what to do with a request to see its underwear drawer (MIF file), while Frame will still make you go through three or four clicks just to start a simple file.
When will little WP2 be born? And what about brothers and sisters? I am guessing that the first (therefore unusable) release of WP2 will be next summer sometime. It will Version 1.0 and it will crash when you try and generate an index. An update will be available quickly, and 2.0 will be out in 2007.
I also guess that WP2 will not be part of the Basic Office Suite. You will be able to buy WP2 with Word, Visio and PowerPoint, but you'd better check your company's credit limit first. It will be part of the Microsoft Ultra Deluxe, Turbo Edition of "Office". There are a lot of people who are using Word and want some of Frame's power. They may not even know Frame exists, or don't want to rock the department boat, or have a boss who thinks an Index and a Table of Contents are the same thing…
How will companies decide which products to buy? In 2008, I envision the following scenario: MegaCorp buys 35 WP2 licenses and 120 Word licenses. (FrameMaker has been swept up into the Redmond Goliath, and things like true MIF files are just a distant memory.) The 35 licenses are for the following users: they have 25 writers in Tech Pubs, 3 managers and 7 geeks around the company who want As Much Writing Power As Possible. The 120 licenses are for the Rest of the Company, including those employees who word process their way through the day (like CEOs, etc.)
Name, cost, OS, features, learning curve, failings, MIF files, file capacity, backward compatibility, release date, popularity - when evaluating a documentation program like Word or Frame, what else is there? Oh, one more thing: What will you give them as a wedding present? How about a gift certificate for your company's services? I suspect there will be a lot of file conversion happening in the next couple of years.
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