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How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

arstechnica.com

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Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#11

Post by danso »

Interesting new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss comment on the OP:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkx...

> I remember the exact moment that Quark pssed me off so badly that it forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return the unopened PC version for a Mac version but they would do nothing. No transfer, no refund, I was S.O.L. of $800. That pushed me over the edge to try Indesign, and I never looked back. I now owe Quark thanks, because as a printer and early adopter of Indesign, I personally helped dozens of my designer customers discover Indesign and switch from Quark. Adobe was a true partner company and we all made great businesses together….*

> …. until Adobe Creative Cloud. It's dejaVu all over again, where Quark and now Adobe customers feedback can be ignored. Adobe with CC has succeeded in pssing off former advocates so badly that it's a distasteful just to say Adobe. In one swoop they destroyed tens of thousands of users paid value in anyone's full paid CS6. (except for a slight discount for first year towards forever payments). This CC Adobe bundle of 20+ crap apps to create value, much like Corel tried to do unsuccessfully a decade earlier, is an insult.*

---

I'm still using my legal copy of CS5, though I recently upgraded from Lightroom 4 to Lightroom 5. There was some kind of deal to use the Creative Cloud but I ignored it because even though I was only upgrading because LR4 doesn't yet support my new camera, the $99 upgrade is a pittance compared to the time LR saves me in photo editing. Second to Sublime Text, Lightroom is my favorite "work" purchase I've made as an individual customer.

So, what do people think of the Cloud? I didn't really read the terms, just that it sounded cheaper, in the way that "Just 30 monthly installments of $10!" sounds cheaper on certain TV advertisements.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#12

Post by vvvVVVvvv »

unwind wrote: post #7

It was interesting that the article used the word bo{2}b in the section about regular expressions. 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.

Well it's ArsTechnica, not Disney Channel.

A bit immature but nothing really offensive.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#14

Post by ttcbj »

tim333 wrote: post #4

The article mentions Quark lost because it became rubbish but does not give the more interesting reason as to why that happened, basically that "The original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to India" http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...

For what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. He was very knowledgable about Quark's code.

During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen.

There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant.

I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines.

InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster.

I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation.

I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#15

Post by rayiner »

billyhoffman wrote: post #10

A product with 95% market share needs engineering a lot less than it needs sales/finance. As engineers, we see this as "business guys screwing it all up." But these companies are acting rationally give the environment they are in. Why the focus on sales? Because at that size of a market share the features of the product matter less. Adding feature X is very unlikely to get you more share. Additionally, the product ha…

Isn't that a textbook example of the dangers of short term thinking? In any engineering field, it's irrational to think that the industry won't shift underneath you in a way that makes your 95% market share irrelevant. And when the market does shift, the incumbent that fired all its engineers will be easy pickings for the new breed of competitors.

It's not just a tech industry issue either. When the U.S. auto industry was ascendent, Japan had a reputation for poor quality products and South Korea wasn't even on the scene yet. Well, Japan kept improving the technology and with that the quality, and not only caught up but blew past Detroit and the automakers did not even see it coming. U.S. automakers have spent the last few decades investing in the improvements Japanese companies had the foresight to be investing in all along.

It's not "rational" for companies to mortgage their futures to goose profits in the near term. It might be "rational" for executives to do so, but not for corporations as a whole.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#16

Post by err4nt »

I have used both inDesign and Quark in a professional print-design setting.

Another thing that the author left out here was the to be a power-user of nearly _any_ software package requires you to learn keyboard shortcuts.

I can remember day 1 I made up a big list of all Quark shortcuts, printed & laminated it and used that thing all day every day. This was a major hurdle to new Quarks users - they're too slow until they memorize the shortcuts.

inDesign was smart about this, not only could you _change_ your user shortcuts, but they were malleable enough you could even make the same as Quark's shortcuts if you so desired. You had the freedom to mold the software to your way of working.

Ultimately it became very very trivial for Quark users to switch _to_ inDesign, but going from inDesign _to_ Quark was like a step back in time.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#17

Post by smacktoward »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #5

It all boiled down to one thing for me as a print designer at the time: OS X. 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…

Yeah, Quark made a lot of mistakes, but I agree that this was the Big One. Quark's audience were Mac users, Mac users were moving to OS X, Quark refused to go with them. Even at the time it was an utterly baffling decision; it hasn't gotten any easier to understand with time.

I would love to read an article that interviews Quark insiders about why they made that choice, what the internal factors were that drove them in that direction. Seeing as how it was basically corporate suicide and all.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#18

Post by danielweber »

smacktoward wrote: post #17
jaysonelliot wrote: post #5

It all boiled down to one thing for me as a print designer at the time: OS X. 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…

Yeah, Quark made a lot of mistakes, but I agree that this was the Big One. Quark's audience were Mac users, Mac users were moving to OS X, Quark refused to go with them. Even at the time it was an utterly baffling decision; it hasn't gotten any easier to understand with time. I would love to read an article that interviews Quark insiders about why they made that choice, what the internal factors were that drove them…

What portion of their users were Mac users?

I vaguely recall Quark being in the category of things where the software cost more than the hardware. At some level it can make sense to tell the user to switch their hardware and OS (since it's the smaller portion of the cost), but you still need the customers to listen.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#19

Post by egypturnash »

danso wrote: post #11

Interesting new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss comment on the OP: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkx... > I remember the exact moment that Quark p ssed me off so badly that it forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return…

I pretty much only use Illustrator. I'm still on CS6. It didn't help much that CC1 was one of those releases where I look at the list of new features and say "there is nothing here for me" that's happened every 3-4 years since Adobe moved to the marketing-driven "new release every year" model instead of the developer-driven "new release when it's done" one.

I've done the math and the Cloud model is not worth it for me. It starts to make sense if you regularly use like 4 of their big apps, I think.

Edit. Oh shit I just looked and they've quietly added some new features that I actually would like to have. Now I'm running the numbers. The existing pre-CC user pricing works for me - $360/y for my one big app every day, plus being fully legit when I need to briefly use InDesign to lay out a book or Premiere to edit a Kickstarter video - but once that trial year is over I think I'll be ditching it for the single app subscription plus briefly subscribing to other apps and canceling them.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#20

Post by MBCook »

On episode 54 of Accidental Tech Podcast [1], they mentioned a recent flair-up about the screen writing software Final Draft.

It seems the CEO went on a podcast about script writing called ScriptNotes two times [2] and it sounds like he was caught totally flat by listener feedback about how far behind his product was. Film director Kent Tessman wrote up a post [3] about how foreseeable much of this was and just how bad the situation is.

It reminded me quite a bit of this article. An old & dominate piece of software that is built on old technologies and has obvious deficiencies that doesn't seem to be progressing and seems ripe for disruption.

1. http://atp.fm/episodes/54-goto-fail

2a . http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-...

2b. http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space

3. http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/

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