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Why Did Adobe Buy Macromedia?
option8 writes "According to John Dvorak the reasoning behind Adobe's recent (and to many, surprising) purchase of Macromedia for $3.4 billion is that Adobe was afraid Microsoft was going to do it first. An interesting look at the thinking and attitude of Adobe from someone who's been following them for a long time. From TFA: "So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)""
Sure it was purchased on FUD but it's a very valid fear. It's not like they aren't getting anything out of the deal.
As much as I hate Adobe having a Monopoly, I'm not sure I'd like it more if they shared the market with Microsoft only to go the way of Corel in a few years.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Microsoft could end up buying Adobe in the end if this merger doesn't work out as intended and profits/revenue fall because of management problems.
If MS really were after Macromedia, wouldn't Apple have been in there quicksmart?
An Apple/Macromedia merger would make me feel a bit better about the future direction of Macromedia software. Too late now though.
exactly anonymous coward.
I was going to write my take on it but a blogger by the name of Jesse Ezell has already put it very nicely. Here's the text of his blog entry:
My Thoughts on the Adobe-Macromedia Deal
It is pretty clear from the acquisition that Adobe is going to be making a major push into web media. They have tried a few times with tools like InDesign and LiveMotion to make some progress, but Macromedia has been extremely successful at fending off their attacks with Dreamweaver and Flash. As a result, Adobe has been able to rule the desktop publishing market and Macromedia has been able to rule the web content market. The mix of the two companies is going to make one hell of a powerful media creation beast. Ok, but that is the obvious stuff. Obviously anyone who buys out Macromedia wants Flash, because Flash is what Macromedia is all about. What else might this mean?
If you look at Macromedia's actions over the past year or so, it seemed pretty likely that they were looking for a buyer. They were gradually buying up smaller companies to add to their arsenal and make themselves more attractive to potential buyers. Choosing eHelp and Presedia as acquisitions tells me that perhaps Adobe is interested in making some moves into the super hot eLearning market. Right now, all Adobe really has going for them is PDF--which is a pretty darn valueble assest, but is really more suited for the web of the past than the web of the future. PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days. The next generation web is all about media, and that is where Flash comes into the picture. eHelp and Presedia were two companies in the front of the eLearning pack, and the timing of these two acquisitions is just too close to mean nothing. However, this also means that eHelp / Presedia customers are in for even more fun as their products all get jumbled up in yet another acquisition. Even Macromedia didn't continue to support all of eHelp's products...
For designers, this acquisition is definately a good thing. They get the best of both worlds as Macromedia and Adobe tag team anyone who attempts to challenge them. Developers, on the other hand, may not have it so lucky. What is to become of Cold Fusion? What about Flex? One of my long-standing complaints about Macromedia is that they don't understand developers. Surely this isn't going to be helped by Macromedia merging with an even more designer centric company. I definately trust the management at Adobe a bit more than Macromedia's management, but you can't help but realize that Adobe really doesn't have a lot of experience with developer centric software. Personally, I would have much rather seen Microsoft acquire Macromedia and give us some kick-ass next generation web tools, but they are too focused on Avalon and XAML right now, so we'll have to leave that to the Xamlon guys or get everyone running Avalon so we can deliver the stuff natively.
In any case, one thing is certain, watching this play out is going to be very interesting.
[end]
--
Fairfax Underground: Fairfax County chat and discussion forums, with an underground twist
I wonder if Apple or Microsoft will buy Adobe in the next few years?
So I read TFA, and what did I see?
Empty ramblings. Assertion. No proof, no quotes, nothin'.
I know it's an opinion piece. It's still a waste of space.
Incidentally, the share price of MACR is now well above what it was before the takeover was announced, so his crap about the market "dropping" the stock is blatant nonsense.
Whats going to happen to fireworks now???
Will Adobe put the same amount of effort into it as they do with photoshop??
I like photoshop, but everything I have learned I first did in fireworks & I feel more comfortable using it.
I hope Adobe won't force people across to photoshop to save a few bucks continuing to develop fireworks.
Speculatory at best.
What I see is that Adobe wanted to put flash in pdf and MacroM didn't want to license cheap. So Adobe bought MM to get Flash, and now I see the reverse: Acrobat Reader 8.0 implemented in flash with on-demand font-laguage and all that crap.
Also, PDF with flash becomes fully animated, media-rich format.
I think that dreamweaver will essentially become a photoshop add-on. This way, very smart graphic designers will make a beautiful graphic, click on the "Dream-Weave-it" button, and presto: A complete web page with rollovers from layers.
As far as the Macromedia people, they had best get ready to wear the Adobe hat or find themselves on the street.
What else. Flash. Yes, back to Flash. If I email you a PDF document, and now it's on your PC, and you open it, and flash is inbedded in it, and you're connected to the net via your ever-present dsl line, flash can actually go to the web and pull content. So Adobe Acrobat Reader has now become a web browser, since a well-designed flash can emulate a website.
Finally, I think Adobe is in decent shape, but they have to be careful, because while they had photoshop and acrobat, they were still essentially in a lucrative niche market. They have become a bigger fish, and they are going to find that they have a lot more competitors. And just perhaps they might find that the best macromedia people will start working elsewhere and competing too.
Was my post speculative enough for you?
"Piter, too, is dead."
huh?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Macromedia was gaining traction with selling Flash Lite players to mobile phone manufacturers. Adobe was competing by supporting an open standard, SVG with its mobile authoring tools.
Now Adobe eliminates this competitor by owning it.
But meanwhile, on phones, SVG is proliferating.
SVG is an open standard, XML, scriptable, event-driven UI.
Will Macrodobe support an oepn standard mobile web?
Or will it want developers to pay $xxx for tools to author content for the mobile web using formats it owns and controls?
I could see MS buying PaintShop Pro as an excuse to charge more.
Think they'd ever go after AutoCAD?
Lower-end CAD programs are slowly eating into the traditional markets (i.e., people getting fed up with Autodesk's ongoing expensive upgrades that offer less and less "functionality").
Not all architectural/engineering/construction firms can afford to keep up with "productivity-enhancing" software updates especially when what really counts is what you provide to the builder. 3D walk/flythroughs are nice and everything, but much of that is eyecandy designed to impress executives.
This is not to say that 3D CAD doesn't have its place, as a well-rendered, interactive model is quite amazing to see. But, as always, the devil is in the details and the proof is in the pudding (if you assume that the "pudding" equates to lower construction costs and faster construction).
Probably, the 90/10 rule applies (time spent to complete a project) and with process plants or other "real world" installations you can't just ship out a beta and fix it later by responding to user input.
Re-reading this, I seem to have ranted off-topic, sorry.
Why would Microsoft want Macromedia? Lets run through Macromedia's product line for a second:
.NET platform, why would they need these?
.NET, why on earth would it need yet more?
* ColdFusion, Flex, Breeze, etc. - Server side scripting and application servers. Microsoft has IIS and their
* Flash and related client-side technologies - Microsoft is bringing out Avalon, a graphical engine for developing Internet applications without needing a web browser, so they don't need this.
* Dreamweaver and other editors - Microsoft focuses its development platform solely behind Visual Studio
So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
However, it is well known that Macromedia have had financial difficulties over the past few years. With many excellent technologies and applications they have IMHO suffered from a lack of focus and direction which has ultimately hit their bottom line. I do think that they would have been bought out sooner or later, either that or gone through some major internal reshuffling (and firings) to fix the situation - I guess we now know which they opted for.
Damien
There's isn't the slightest shred of evidence that Microsoft has even thought of buying Macromedia. Dvorak says so himself.
I don't think the article ever stated or implied that this was the case. Rather, it suggested that Microsoft's interest in web content creation (as evidenced by FrontPage, ASP.Net, and so on) compelled Adobe to buy Macromedia (Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, and so on) in order to outflank MS.
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented.
True. However, he correctly points out that the recent lawsuit between Adobe and Macromedia over tabbed palettes created considerable ill will between the two, making the merger more difficult than it otherwise would be.
Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have.
Why does Adobe need their expertise? Their flagship products are doing just fine, Freehand isn't close to beating Illustrator in the market, and GoLive--the only product MM competes with and exceeds--has never been key to Adobe's portfolio anyway. Adobe has been turning a profit nicely without MM under their control.
On the other hand, MM's products are so different from Adobe's that embracing and improving them would require a major change of mindset at Adobe. Frankly, they're more likely to damage Dreamweaver and Flash than build upon them.
The risk really wasn't worth $3.4 billion, is Dvorak's opinion. Mine as well.
Just recently Adobe is slowly showing more interests in Linux and its users. Now that they have Macromedia, whats the possibility to have say Dreamweaver and Flash for Linux? I would think that Linux and those 2 packages would make for the choice platform for web content developers. And if (and hope) they bring Photoshop to Linux as well then the transition would be simple for more developers and designers to make the jump to Linux.
I heard a commentator on National Public Radio talk about this merger, and he made lots of sense. PDF has been a defacto standard for web documents for quite a while, and Flash has been gaining lots of ground fast when it comes to streaming media. Basically he said that now, with both PDF and Flash, Adobe Systems will be well positioned to do a complete end-around Microsoft. With regards to Web apps, Adobe will now have the muscle and means to treat the OS as just a commodity. It won't matter who's OS you're running because you'll still be able to use Adobe's products in your web browser.
To a company like Microsoft that's invested itself totally into a "Windows Everywhere" philosophy, that's gotta seem very ominous.
#DeleteChrome
So this is the Second time that Adobe has bought Freehand (remember Aldus). I wonder who it will go to now. or if they will just bury it. BTW, they should've bought Quark instead way back when, I dont think anyone actually working in publishing at the time was still using Pagemaker when Adobe bought Aldus. I miss the name Macromind. I thought it had a much edgier ring than Macromedia. Im amazed that Adobe didnt make this move a long time ago. As far as photoshop goes. I think it got to the top because A. it had no real competition at the time. and B. from Piracy. Everybody uses Photoshop because everybody knows Photoshop. I was reading elsewhere in this post about the new security measures Adobe has put into CS. I think its interesting that nobody I know is using CS. I work in the game industry and everyone I know is still using 6 or 7. I think people generally want to keep it compatable with what they have at home. It would be interesting to see the sales figures on CS vs. other upgrades. I think Piracy helped Adobe, and I think they know it. Otherwise they wouldve done a hardware dongle or security software a long time ago. But thats all my speculation, and its off topic anyhow.
What BS!
They've both been developing for Macs forever, Adobe was born writing software for the Mac platform, Macromedia (as Macromind) arrived on the scene several years later AFAIK. Either way, that experience probably counts for jack shit in developing for MacOS X.
Check your facts* before posting please....
FCPro, when released was not competition for Premiere. At the time, it was concieved as a broadcast video and film editing product, competing in the market with Avid and other specialist vendors. Permiere may have come a way since then, but back then, Adobe decided that rather than spend to bring it to X, and have to compete against / bring it to the standard of the OS vendor's own offerings (FCPro) that it would withdraw from the Mac market in video editing. There is approximately zero-chance that Adobe will be developing another Mac video product. The only product that they make for Mac, After Effects, is the only one with a strong competitive advantage. Another example would be Album, it will never be coming to Mac while Apple make iPhoto.
Tho the article itself is thin on detail, it does try to pose a possible reasoning to the takeover, taht has everyone shaking their heads. People who make their livings using Macromedia's products are understandably nervous... with so many competing products, this sort of thing is bound to result in less choice for users, unless, as suggested on Ars Technica, some sort of two tiered approach to the design product lines is taken, with Macormedia's offerings on the lower tier. It's easy enough, especially in the snobby world of design, to say that everyone uses Photoshop and Illustrator, but Freehand and Fireworks have their fans. And they're agressively bundled with Macromedia's current flagship product, Flash.
In the drive to cut costs after Adobe has dug deep to make this purchase, I'd be more concerned for some of Macromedia's lesser products such as Director & Authorware... that they made money for their precvious owner might not save them, as the bar for acceptable performance may well be raised, given the 2 company's price:earnings ratios. Although having very few competitors in their respective niche markets might count for something...
* I know that Wikipaedia != facts, but i don't think there's much in that particular entry that's opinion
PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days.
I don't understand this at all. Every form I download from my state government is PDF, for example, often the handy fill-in type. That isn't boring, it's damn useful. Most useful documentation on the web is also distributed as PDF.
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
writing the craziest shit he can think up, that's what. Metcalfe (an original developer of ethernet at Xerox PARC) did the same with his "Open Sores" anti-Linux article.
.
All you've done with your comment is demonstrate your deep, long-lived denial of certain valid points. To a whole bunch of people the 'open sores' article wasn't 'the craziest shit he could think up.' Rather, many people saw it as Metcalfe pointing out the emperor's lack of a wardrobe.
Anyhow. .
There are sure a lot of retarded comments on this post. Why would Adobe want Macromedia?
t op.
To finally get a real jump in the interactive world. Dreamweaver is the best WYSWIG editor out there and way better than Go-Live. Flash is definetly the web standard for vector based interactive on the web and kicks ass over SVG, which might be widely supported (if you down load the plug-in), but does not have a lot of support from web developers. Cold Fusion is just as solid as ASP, and can can be integrated easily to Flash using Flash Remoting.
Adobe will finally have a solid stake in the web world, which will now give them control over print AND interactive mediums. The only thing left for Adobe is to try and buy the Final Cut suite from Apple (of course that's not gonna happen).
I also read about people comparing Adobe to MS. What in the world are you thinking? There are other options out there! Adobe software just far outperforms all the others. It's not like they have a monoply on in the market then let their products go to shit (i.e. MS). Photoshop, illustrator and indesign all have had major competition in the past. Anyone remember that not long ago, Quark had a strangle hold on the desktop publishing market? And to you people who think Gimp holds a candle to Photoshop, need to wake the fuck up. I think open-source software is great, and Gimp is a solid program, but come on, if you really know what your doing, it is not even close.
Microsoft buys up good software, then either scraps it, or sells it with little to no improvements. Microsoft software sucks.
Adobe does a great job with their user interfaces, which is why Macromedia was using the same structure. In 2000, right before Flash 5 was released, Adobe won a lawsuit against Macromedia for infringing its patent: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-898061.html?tag=fd_
Either way, there are numerous reasons for Adobe to want to purchase Macromedia. There are also probably a lot of reasons why MS would want to own Macromedia, but who cares, they didn't, so why stir the pot with a BS story with with no proof?
As a professional retoucher and one who was forced to use film gimp (cinepaint) GIMP SUCKS. The ui is just plain BAD. Photoshops ui is mildly better but at least you can increase a brush size with a keyboard command and not dig 2 layers deep in the ui to make a brush the size you need. Gimp is also MAD MAD slow on a file of any size. This is not a troll it is my professional opinion that gimp is just plain a pain to use. I tried because everyone was saying how great gimp is. It aint great. Oh and if /. would get its act together and send me my password after trying everything including sending an email like it says to do I would post anonymously.
Dvorak was a huge Mac fan who became disheartened with how incompetantly Apple was being run in the 1990s. I think he was trying to speak for the silent majority of Apple users, many of whom did abandon the platform in that time period. Unfortunately, like today, the Mac magazines were sold to the fanboy market that rejected any form of dissent. Now that Apple has revitalized itself, the Mac Dvorak-haters should acknowledge that he was largely correct in his analyses.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I hope they leave Fireworks alone, or at least migrate some of its more useful web features to Photoshop in a handy way. It is, IMHO, far superior for putting together little bits and pieces of websites than Photoshop has ever been.
Or, more appropriately, why does India have nukes?
It ain't Pakistan, it's China.
Macrodobe has a disgusting amount of leverage that neither Adobe nor Macromedia alone have - lop Quark out of the equation and Macrodobe OWNS desktop publishing on two platforms. Artschool/Vo-Tech "web design" ? They'll own that. Graphics creation and production? Yeah, Apple makes your swankass Final Cut Pro but you're still doing the graphics for your overlays in Macrodobe Photoshop MX 2006.
You really think Apple or Microsoft can afford to piss off The De Facto Graphics Standard?
No.
Hell, Apple suffered for YEARS under Adobe's continuing threats to drop Mac support for $fillintheblank because whatever Apple was intending to do to the OS (full memory protection planned for 9.3, for example- which had been planned and Working for awhile but was never implemented for this reason) would "force them to rewrite their applications" and there wasn't enough money in the mac market to make that worthwhile (bullshit).
If it wasn't for Photoshop and Illustrator, Apple would have probably told them to shove it years ago. Hell, the steaming pile of shit that is Premiere is one of the primary reasons that iMovie and the light version of FCP exist at all - video editing on the mac prior to these apps was like mp3 playback on the mac prior to iTunes - it either Sucked Horribly or you paid out the ass for something Awesome (usually hardware linked) to do it. No middle ground.
I'm ranting, I'm ranting... but Macromedia's OS X apps are actually semi-decent (Flash support blows a dead moose, but it always has), and Adobe's leave a lot to be desired. "Why is Photoshop 5.5 running IN CLASSIC FASTER than Photoshop CS for just about everything?!" kind of a lot to be desired.
As a Creative Professional, I'm disgusted to see one of the three companies I buy software from (Macromedia, Adobe, Apple) get swallowed up by the asshole of the three.
Because for almost a decade I worked, lived and breathed Macromedia products. Not to say that I did not utilize anything else, but on any given day in my current career, I would be opening up Macromedia software about 70% of the time. I would say that is true for a large number of web designers/web application developers. Everytime I hear someone saying "they blocked Flash because of the stupid ads" has probably not seen Flash's potential or at least, not aware of it. Take a look at some of the interfaces when you get your airline tickets processed, or book events at an online kiosk. Flash (coupled with other technologies). bank machine terminals - Flash interface (again coupled with other technologies). Please do not compare Flash with Adobe Acrobat. FlashPaper was the closest equivalent. Please check out all the bloggers who use Macromedia tools (as well as blogs from Macromedia employees) to see their expectations for the future. Yes some sort of Acrobat hybrid with dynamic Flash capabilities is proposed, but more likely Adobe will take advantage of FlashPaper technology and attempt to fix acrobat. FlashPaper, being newer, is lighter, utilizes swf (making it more ubiquitous) and easier to develop with than current Acrobat forms. Fireworks - I was testing Fireworks back in its early betas. It was the Fireworks tool that developers first saw the concept of "slicing" an image into a series of smaller images within an HTML table (a process, I recall we used to do manually on graph paper, then manually cut up in an ancient version of Photoshop). Fireworks was premised to be a "Photoshop" killer for the web...and it did get Adobe scared, as Adobe developed and released imageready (which no one bought), then integrated it into Photoshop so that an existing PS user base would slowly kill off the smaller but rabid Fireworks base. Expectation: Fireworks will die, but its process and functionalities will merge into ImageReady. ImageReady produced retarded code for the longest time, so it was due for a fix (and those who thought otherwise obviously was no expert in Fireworks). Flash - Now there was/is Macromedia's crown jewel. An appealing option for Adobe. Also Microsoft, (based on Flash's popularity as a technology, and don't blame Macromedia for the content produced within Flash - just because a large number of content providers use Flash for banners and other junk, that is the content being bad, not Flash). There were lawsuits a few years back over tool interfaces between Adobe and Macromedia, with Flash being a sorespot (Flash 5 had Photoshop-like palettes). Now they can save their legal fees and hopefully invest it into some improvement. Director - may join with Premiere? Dreamweaver - the story is that GoLive was a decent editor for the Mac system - GoLive was bought by Adobe; large numbers of their technical and marketing team left and joined - Macromedia - creating Dreamweaver. GoLive is released under Adobe and languishes. Adobe buys Macromedia, now has the entire GoLive team back under its belt. Homesite - came when Macromedia bought Allaire, due to disappear. Server Producsts - Flash Communication Server; Flex; Central; ColdFusion (under JRun); Jrun - probably survive, since Adobe never really had a strong server app tier market (though they tried awhile back) Now have the basis for strong web app development Freehand - hmm, probably disappearing. RoboDemo and the rest of the online help/education space; benefit to Adobe, as they can get into that market. Obviously, this thread is a testimonial to the impact that Macromedia's software has had on all of us, whether you used it or not, whether you loved the tools or hated the tools, you knew the tools. Hopefully Macromedia's tools won't go the way of tools Microsoft's Liquid Motion or Adobe's Live Motion and die...
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
I'm an ex pro-3D animator with broadcast video credits
I use the GIMP daily for basic editing and as much as it is pushed it really isn't up to snuff against PhotoShop for the breadth of tools and effects. I use it these days because I want to support Free tools and if I find myself away from home I want to know my tools are a simple download away without being a pirate or bugged by shareware nags.
That said Gimp 2.2 is MUCH improved. However, the multi windows is a real turn off for regular Windows users. In X I just dedicate a virtual desktop to it. My Dad can cope with many things if he plugs away at it but using Gimp is just too much effort for him.
Turning people from their pirated Photoshop 7 to Gimp is a Herculean task.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Microsoft doesn't because they don't have to. There's plenty of things out there that do....even if you want to convert a DOC file to PDF. Load a print driver that converts it's output into a PDF from ANY app, not just Windows.
To be honest, as much as I dispise Microsoft, I would rather DOC files be the standard. I find most PDF's I need over the net to be bloated. Acrobat Reader is ploted as well. Also, what is this SUDDEN need for every frickin windows app to have a background app that makes the main app "load faster" liek Adobe Acrobat Reader 7. Has this EVER been proven yet? It's not like they are preloading the app into memory so it doesn't have to hit the disk to launch the app. The binary is usually different.
Gorkman
That fix is also described in MozillaZine.
An even better solution is to uninstall Adobe's Reader, and install FoxIt PDF Reader, which is free.
The download (zip) file is less than 1 MegaByte, so it can be downloaded even over a slow dial-up connection. By comparison, the download for Adobe Reader is about 15 MB - 20 MB.
The entire installation for FoxIt PDF Reader takes up less than 2 MB of hard drive space. Adobe Reader takes up about 60 MB. I don't know what Adobe Reader used the other 58 MB for, but I don't miss it. FoxIt PDF Reader loads much faster.
I know. I use both every day in my work as a writer. In general:
Word is for short, free format documents (memos, executive summaries, etc.). Do not attempt to use Word for long documents (200+ pages) or where consistent format across the document is important (in other words, the broken lists will screw things up). There are work-arounds for Word's long-document flaws, but most are more trouble than they're worth.
Frame is for book-length documents (200+ pages) where page layout and consistent formating are important. Using Frame for one page one-off documents is more trouble than it's worth. The learning curve is a little steep at first (for Office users) but Frame's model makes sense and once you get it, it becomes very easy to use.
Personally, I use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job. If I need a fax coversheet, I use Word. When I'm writing a 500-page Admin Guide, I use Frame. In my opinion, the overlap between the two tools is limited. Again, I use both on a daily basis.
Totally agree that Word docs on the 'net are a sign that someone doesn't know what they're doing. Aside from the fact that Word docs can contain macro viruses, since the format isn't "fixed" in the same way as PDF, it's almost a sure thing that the person viewing the Word document isn't seeing the same thing that the person who wrote it saw.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Adobe Photoshop has never been the underdog. Ever. That title has always belonged to JASC's Paint Shop Pro. I've never heard of or seen a real professional state otherwise, only aspiring amateurs.
Paint Shop Pro is good, don't get me wrong. I use it exclusively (disclaimer: I am not an imaging professional)... but under no condition am I under the delusion that it has ever yet been as good or powerful as Photoshop.
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
Wasn't Framemaker the basis for Indesign???
I wish. Framemaker is designed with technical books and manuals in mind and is by far the best tool for writing them. InDesign is 100% designed for making magazines which is obvious to anyone who has tried to use it for a book. Auto layouts are weak, auto numbering and versions are basically nonexistent in comparison, auto cross-references don't exist, conditional text is completely missing, style mappings within a document and from imports are buggy and unusable, and long document support is very poor.
Since Adobe killed Framemaker for the Mac I know a number of professionals who had to switch to Windows and a number who just run a really old version in the Classic environment. I'm sure InDesign is a godsend for magazine publishers, but is is piss poor for technical writers. Quark is actually a better option in many cases.