以下に引用するのは、InDesignCSのCD内にあるサンプル"History of Adobe"という文章の中の、PageMakerをあきらめてInDesignの開発に移行するところの叙述の引用です。Adobe開発者がPa geMakerをどう見ているかの参考になれば幸いです。
PageMaker still sold well, but its users were primarily small-business
owners, nonprofit organizations, and office workers who produced in-house newsletters, bulletins, and the like, and who mostly used Windows-based PCs. While Adobe saw those customers as important, they did not make up the high-end market its publishing strategy required.
Unfortunately, there was very little that could be done to PageMaker to get that audience back. The technical foundation of PageMaker was old and creaky. The core application had barely been modified since 1990.
Because its structure did not allow the seamless integration of additional components, new features had been grafted onto the program. Over time, additions were often written with different programming methods, making the application a software Tower of Babel. Fixing one bug—let alone adding a feature—might break other parts of the program. In some software areas, no one knew how large parts of PageMaker worked. The engineers who had originally implemented the features had left Aldus long before the acquisition, and their knowledge was never captured.
As Warnock puts it, “The code base was in terrible shape, and modifying anything was tough.” To get PageMaker in fighting trim to take on QuarkXPress and meet the demands of a changing marketplace would require a complete overhaul of the program, perhaps even a complete rebranding. It was easier to start from scratch.
