Comments on: Turning over a new leaf at Quark

After having dropped off the radar, Quark is set to revolutionize publishing--again. CEO Ray Schiavone explains how.

[Galaxy5]

Too Little, too late

I'll be the first to say it; I keep an old PPC Mac around to run XPress
3.1.1 in Classic, but after they delivered such underwhelming
products during the 2000-20005 timeframe, I literally forgot
about them.

It'll be nice to see some competition for Adobe, but frankly, I think
most people have been fed up with Quark for so long that it'd take
a miracle to reform the company and product's image.

[wango2007]

Right on

You're exactly right. I held on until ver 5.01, but then felt Quark was a lost cause.

The Adobe Suite is indeed sweet. Why push the river when you can just let it flow?

[rileykeiko]

They're Toast

Quark's customer service ranks in the basement in the annals of
tech service. They were so arrogant and unhelpful that I couldn't
wait to switch my company to InDesign. They're talking 2006. You
can only screw your customers for so long until they decide they've
had enough. See ya Quark.

[junglepayne]

Pagemaker? Sheesh!

doesn't seem like he knows his competition quite as well as he might presume...no wonder they are not a player on the same stage as Adobe.

"...probably felt that they had to buy PageMaker and Illustrator, so they pretty much got InDesign free anyway"

[ServedUp]

Former CEO Kamar Aulakh killed the company

The damage has been done. Companies are moving over to
Indesign in droves. Its a mass exodus. For one its cheaper, two
they upgrade more often then Quark did, when they had control
of this market. Adobe puts "real" functionality into their
upgrades which has probably saved many a Designer from
getting headaches. Quark stayed at Version 3 for more than five
years and they couldn't even display EPS files properly. I mean,
whats up with that?

But the former CEO was such a moron not to have prepared
XPress for the first version of MacOS X. That was the biggest
blunder that sent him packing from the company. I mean what a
complete moron he never understood his target audience at all.
He only saw dollar signs hanging from Gate's pocket and saw
him as a savior. LOL! What a moron!

[Goodbye Helicopter]

DOA

Quark was DOA with the release of version 5.
They treated their customers like thieves all through the version
4 era when they were the only serious option in the professional
printing world. Then they were late to migrate to OS X and at a
ridiculous pricing structure. They too mistakenly believed Apple
was doomed and focused on a non-existent Windows market.
Apple came back like gangbusters. Adobe priced them out of
the market and steadily improved InDesign while gobbling up
Macromedia. And these days, it is stupid easy to create
consumer grade page layout/word processing apps. The rest is
history, as they say...
Quark Xpress was always quirky, and now it will only be to their
benefit to get bought by Microsoft. Apple definitely won't buy
them because they can develop (and possibly are developing)
their own pro page layout app in-house with private APIs.
They've already beaten Adobe at the video game and are very
competitive in the motion graphics game. They've made
incredible strides in the office app game and are currently
making massive inroads in the industry with the MacBook and
MacBook Pro and iPhone. I would not be shocked to see Apple
release a page layout app in Japan first. Probably the most
lucrative market for such an app...

[farmerbob]

I use to work at Quark and . . . .

. . . what really happened is that they let their ego and severely bad TS/CS get in the way of business. And it was just enough to let Indesign get a good foothold. They screwed themselves and no amount of corporate BS from a new CEO is going to fix the bad waters. They're scrambling for their lives at 1800 Grant Street.

[ionlyneeditonce]

Quark, The New Pagemaker

Quark's arrogance cost them an untold number of customers, including all three ad agencies I worked with over the past decade. Quark's insistence that every customer is a thief made installing the thing a trial unto itself, and thanks to Quark's customer service, installing was just the beginning of the pain if you were unlucky enough to have problems with the software.

Today, Quark is "Pagemaker" for a whole new generation of agencies, designers and desktop publishers... an outdated and unsupported piece of software sitting on an extra computer just in case a client or archived file needs to be recovered.