Adobe Aims To Take On Ms Frontpage With Pagemill 3.0

Computergram International, Feb 4, 1998

San Jose, California based desktop publishing and document management company Adobe Systems Inc has released PageMill 3.0, the latest incarnation of its web site creation and management tool, saying that future emphasis for this and other products will be on the PC led Small Office/ Home Office market.

The change of emphasis looks like a reaction to the increasing dominance of Microsoft Corp's FrontPage tool and the shrinking size of the high-end Macintosh market. Yvonne French, product marketing manager for PageMill in Europe is reluctant to release sales figures saying that the two products were "neck and neck" on around 26% market share back in 1996 but concedes that the company's market share "did drop quite considerably" last year. Adobe claims to have shipped "more than 500,000" copies of PageMill worldwide. The company says the new offering boasts enhanced integrated site management capabilities, designed to enable users to view the whole web site in one go and update features such as graphics, links, text and animations by dragging and dropping. Adobe is also pushing improved support for Java and multimedia content, promising users the ability to embed, modify and edit multimedia elements Java applets and animated GIF images directly inside the PageMil l editor rather than using a separate tool. French concedes that PageMill does not have the breadth of features of FrontPage but maintains that it is aimed "at a completely different market" saying that Adobe has focused more on making the product easier to use. The company says a survey of its customers revealed most were companies with fewer than 25 users. French adds that the company is currently working on scaled down versions of its high-end tools aimed at the SOHO market which should be released "later this year" although she refused to disclose further details. A beta version of Adobe PageMill 3.0 is currently up on Windows 95 and NT 4.0 and can be downloaded free at http://www.adobe.co.uk. The full version will ship in March priced at $99 and will be bundled with Photoshop LE, a limited version of the company's image manipulation software. A new version of PageMill for Macintosh will be available later in the year.