I hope you read this Adobe, though I assume you won't. Over a year ago, before we upgraded to Creative Cloud, a customer service representative assured me through chat that Fireworks wasn't going anywhere after I had read some news that it was being discontinued. I later found out their reassurance was false.
Fireworks is easily 30% more efficient than Photoshop for the type of work we do, which involves designing display advertisements in jpg and gif format. This means my personnel costs go up 30%. This hurts our company. Fireworks is a super efficient tool, not just for display ads but for rapid prototyping of websites and even vector elements. While Photoshop and Illustrator may be more versatile overall, Fireworks is still faster. Because Illustrator and Photoshop are so versatile, they are also bloated and less intuitive. Sometimes it takes several more clicks to accomplish the same task.
I am glad you finally took the subscription route with Creative Cloud. Too many times I became frustrated being forced to shell out huge sums of money since previous versions of your software broke with OS updates (i.e. half my fonts stopped working in Fireworks with no fix from Adobe even though a multitude were discussing the problem). No wonder so many people pirate your software. Why shell out $1000 when a year later your OS update will break the software? So in order to "adjust" to piracy, I assume you justified these high prices, which in turn created more piracy. Creative Cloud... one point for Adobe.
Now Fireworks is breaking because you stopped supporting it, and I can't say I'm surprised. In fact, with each update of Creative Cloud, a new feature seems to be broken. We can't get animated gifs to stop looping forever. The intuitive click on fill then choose a color eye dropper tool that allowed you to grab colors off canvas now chooses the wrong shade. Kerning is less consistent. I assume more will break, but I'm hanging on, because even with numerous bugs it is STILL more efficient than Photoshop for what we do.
The primary reason Fireworks didn't take off is because too many people just didn't know about its strengths, including Adobe. Adobe undervalued their acquisition of Macromedia's intellectual property and overvalued their own intellectual property. For this reason it wasn't promoted properly, and people doing work better suited to Fireworks chose Photoshop instead, simply because they didn't know that Fireworks was the best tool for the job. Now Adobe thinks Photoshop is a suitable alternative. It isn't.
I really hope you have some alternative lean, mean intuitive app in the works that serves as an alternative to Fireworks. If not I'm going to be very disappointed, and eagerly awaiting a newcomer in the design software industry that can do it right. Your customer service is terrible. I couldn't even find an email address to send this to. I'm assuming this is just going into the void and will never be read. How can you possibly know your audience without communicating with them? Or at least, when you do communicate with them, make sure your customer service reps are correct with their answers.
Sincerely,
Missing Macromedia