ending support for 16-bit/Win 3.1

[Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU>]

Kristin -

> After much discussion, my organization is planning to end development
> and support of 16-bit applications.  Following our next release, all
> additional releases will be 32-bit only and thus require Windows 95/
> above or Windows NT.  As we have a significant customer base still
> using 16-bit/Windows 3.1, we plan to announce this change when we
> rollout our next release, which will run on both 16-bit and 32-bit
> platforms.  In essence, we plan to warn our clients one release (and
> several months) ahead of time before cutting off the 16-bit support.

Has any of the discussion been with key customers, or was it all
within your organisation? It would be dangerous to make such a
critical decision without consulting the people who can put you out
of business if you annoy them.

If the final decision has been made you can't in all honesty pretend
to be consulting them about it. But you could still organise briefings
in order to get feedback about the timing of the move -- "We're
committed to supporting 3.1 until at least mid-1999. We'd like to
know how your forward plans would be affected once we focus on 32-bit
applications. How can we help make the transition easier?" blah blah
blah.

I've seen a couple of recent cases on the Framers list where previously
happy users reacted quite angrily to Adobe's decision to withdraw
products. I'm sure these were much discussed within Adobe and were
probably the right long-term decisions, but they resulted in a few
users being highly pissed off. One was the withdrawal of support for
Win 3.1. The writer in question had no control over the choice of OS;
for good reasons her company had decided to stay with 3.1 for the time
being. And here was Frame Tech Support saying "Yes, that's a bug, but
it won't be fixed. You have to upgrade to Windows 95."

The other case was Frame's on-line viewer products, FrameReader and
FrameViewer. I hear Reader has simply vanished from the new release.
One long-time Framer wrote that he'd just spent months researching,
recommending and implementing an online documentation solution based
on FrameReader. Now he's either locked out of future versions of Frame,
or he has to abandon his Reader solution. Either way he has egg on his
face.

Another Framer then found an obscure clause in the licence agreement
that could be read to mean that FrameViewer's days are also numbered.
Maybe it doesn't mean that. But the annoyance generated by Adobe's lack
of openness on the Reader issue makes this paranoia understandable.

IMO Adobe is a good company with much good will among their customers.
They're not perfect but their heart's in the right place. But through
secrecy and lack of consultation they fudged this issue and generated
'bad will' in a forum that's usually full of keen, articulate Frame
advocates.

So I suggest you find out how much of a problem this will be for your
user base. Possibly it would be a huge problem in mid-1998, a big
problem in early 1999, and no problem by mid-1999. I don't know. But
I think your company needs to find out.

Regards
---
Stuart Burnfield                "Fun, fun, fun
Functional Software Pty Ltd     In the sun, sun, sun. . ."
mailto:slb -at- fs -dot- com -dot- au