How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing
arstechnica.com

1. End up in control of a thriving business. Doesn't matter how, flashy credentials and a nice suit, mixed with lots of buzz words and business speak usually work.

2. Fire everybody responsible for driving the product forward, frame this as "increasing profitability" or "cutting costs" or similar.

3. Increase sales staff and squeeze as much blood from this stone as possible.

4. When the market for your product inevitably shrinks because you've made your product irrelevant or because of competition or other reasons, blame shifting market winds for making your product irrelevant.

5. Sell the product or company off to somebody else, collect cash out your stock, rinse and repeat...or spend some time on your yacht.

An anecdote also related to the article. I grew up in family business...not very successful family business, but nevertheless. One of the businesses my family ran for a number of years was a small (very small) print house. Most months it didn't generate enough to pay my parent's paycheck, but they stuck with it till retirement.

One of the interesting things I had a chance to see was the invention and growth of the electronic desktop publishing industry. At the start layout was a very long process of getting blocks of text in a chosen font and size printed on small dedicated machines not too far removed from what Gutenberg would recognize. Then a specialist would, on a light table, manually cut the text to size, and glue the pieces of the layout to a master sheet. When all the artwork was finally in place, they'd go and produce a photographic negative of the final page, and then using something like lithography burn the image to a metal sheet which was then used on a press to produce the final page. As you can guess this took forever, but one of the most laborious parts was getting the original little blocks of text made up.

Enter the computer age and a small business like my parents could drop $20k for a pre-press dedicated layout system. I don't remember too many details of it, but it looked basically like your typical early 80s green screen computer. Everything was typed up by a specialist in some kind of meta-LaTeX-like language. There was a secondary very high res and large for the time black and white graphics preview monitor you could render the page on to get a look and proof (if you had enough memory). Then you could "print" the result to a photoprinter that worked quite a bit like a mini-darkroom. You had to keep various reservoirs stocked with the appropriate photographic chemicals, but the output was state of the art of the time. The rest of the process was virtually identical to the above -- even then it cut turnaround time on a job in-half. I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen anything else like it. On occasion, when it broke down, a specialist would be called in to come repair it.

Over time, and as small printing business printing got more complex and this system aged, they replaced it a couple of times until eventually they hired a guy who also had his own smaller printing business on the side. They bought him out and he brought in-house a very early full-pre press desktop publishing system with him. Which was Windows 2.0 and a very old version of Aldus PageMaker, I think it was 3.something and a very expensive laser printer. They pretty much stuck with this setup until they sold the company many years later. Basically what this bought was that it essentially removed all the manual gluing and carefully measured layout such that, once a page was setup, you printed it off, took it to the dark room, made your negative and then the plate and the printing was off. It saved days of work.

Again, as the business grew more complex, the demand for color and complex layouts increased they started to need to do full color proofs. In printing, one of the principle problems is that, once a design gets through all of the darkroom, lithograph, ink color matching, screens etc. it rarely looks much like the original design. This magnifies when you start working with 2 colors, then gets exponentially more complicated up to 4 (CMYK). So the need for rapid proofs of what the design would probably look like became more and more important -- even then the proof only had a passing resemblance to the final product. Unfortunately, the equipment that could produce these proofs was prohibitively expensive. So my parent's graphics guy would outsource his designs to a graphics bureau to make a proof. I think a few pages might take a day or two to turn around and cost a couple hundred dollars.

I used to deliver the disks over to the bureau and remember the first time I walked in. A gleaming open room, packed full of Macintoshes running QuarkXPress and PageMaker, and some very expensive printer looking devices all along a back wall. I'd give them the disk and the job order and inevitably get a groan when I pointed out that it was a PC formatted disk (this was back in the days that this mattered). "Oh, it's you guys, when are you ever going to get a Mac and get Quark? It'll make this much easier." They'd wheel out, on a movable desk, an old PC, blow the dust off and fire it up and make sure the disk was readable. "Okay, we'll sigh call you when it's done."

Various incompatibilities with some of their proof making equipment and their PC caused lots of time and cost overruns, but it had to be done. I'm pretty sure, in the local market they worked in, they may have been the only PC graphics shop around. It sucked interfacing with the rest of the market, but at the same time, everybody who brought in their own artwork did that work on a PC, not a Mac. All the churches and parents getting wedding invitations, all the small businesses getting tri-fold fliers, all of them. And they got lots of business because other companies refused to deal with their homespun PC formatted artwork.

I don't have a point, just thought I'd add a little first hand history.

Quark simply failed to release a version for the new OS, and like the article says, it treated Mac users with disdain when we asked for it. Anyone who worked in print during the '90s and Aughts knows that Windows was disliked by designers for its poor handling of type and PostScript. We weren't about to switch our entire computing platforms, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, just so we could use a layout program from a company that seemed to want us gone.

As far as the print community was concerned, Quark had stopped releasing software. We didn't "switch" so much as we were forced to look elsewhere when the product disappeared.

It was actually a bit strange turning to Adobe at first, because they had picked up Aldus, and Pagemaker with it, and it didn't have the best reputation. Discovering that InDesign was actually superior to Quark was just the cherry on top. Think of it like being dumped by someone you really loved, only to find out there was a much cuter, smarter, funnier person who'd been crushing on you the whole time, just waiting for you to see that they were there. Quark became the ex, and InDesign got the ring.

I'm not particularly bothered by it, although I recognize that it's not neutral with everybody and thus best avoided. I'm just fascinated since it it's very rare in mainstream publications, especially from the US.