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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

#21

Post by galago »

rayiner wrote: post #15
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 industr…

Yeah, this is what happened. I supported Quark users at the time, and everyone was just surprised and confused. In contemporary terms, it would be as if Zynga didn't ship Farmville for iOS 7 and everyone had to switch to something else. Maybe they made a weird bet that customers wouldn't adopt OSX, or migrate at a decades long WinXP-pace. Since Apple binds the OS to hardware, it happened in (only) about five years.

Running Quark 4 and 5 under Classic was ugly and problematic. When Quark 6 finally shipped it was so buggy that it couldn't be deployed. By the time Quark 7 arrived, most people had switched.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#22

Post by gallerytungsten »

bane wrote: post #3

I think this is a good example of what lots of people call the "MBA business model". It's a bit unfair to the MBA, but the idea is this: 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 cos…

I used to deal with this issue of PC PageMaker disks in a Mac & Quark world at a service bureau back in the day. The problem was that PageMaker had unpredictable results when printing to an imagesetter.

I would open the file in Mac PageMaker, delete all the graphics, save the pages as EPS, then rebuild in Quark. Quark had this great Xtension that let you place the output with great precision on the imagesetter film roll.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#23

Post by neonkiwi »

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 needed Premiere for a short project, so the Creative Cloud business model was great for me. I was prepared to spend a couple of bucks to use this software for a month, but they actually give you an automatic first month free.

I don't normally do any video editing, so this saved me a lot of money. But I certainly wouldn't buy my PCB layout software this way; I use it all the time and it makes a lot more sense for me to own a license with the ability to upgrade when a new version comes out rather than pay in perpetuity.

It seems to me that Adobe's business model here is amazing for people outside of their target market. A casual user who rarely needs their tools will love this, but their core user base is losing out. That's very short-sighted on their part.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#24

Post by ForHackernews »

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…

> The only way a company in that market can continue to grow revenue and profits is to reduce costs and increase sales. Hence the focus on sales guys who can talk the talk, bundle software and discount, and do everything to eck out more share. Meanwhile finance guys come in and look to see what they can trim, and often that's engineering.

Honest question from a non-businessperson: Why do you have to keep growing revenue and profits? Like, at some point, if you're making fucktons of money, can't you just focus on guaranteeing you continue making fucktons of money? Isn't it inherently unsustainable to have to be making even larger fucktons?

If I'm traveling someplace, I accelerate until I'm going as fast as I want to be going, and then I don't have to keep accelerating anymore more.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#25

Post by goatforce5 »

bane wrote: post #3

I think this is a good example of what lots of people call the "MBA business model". It's a bit unfair to the MBA, but the idea is this: 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 cos…

> I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen anything else like it

Sounds like a phototypesetter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting

(I'm probably going to get some terminology wrong here, but...) My mum worked at a regional daily newspaper. They had 2 or 3 phototypesetters in the corner of their computer room. Each one was about the size of 3 full height racks. They'd print on to photographic paper and were designed to be automatically fed in to a machine (about 1.5 full height racks high) from the same manufacturer that would develop the paper, ready for a Compositor (ie, a surly unionized employee) to cover it with hot wax, slice it with a scalpel and physically lay it out on the page. If the printer crashed, it would have to be rebooted with a series of switches to bootstrap it far enough that it could load it's bootloader (?) from paper tape.

Where she worked decided to use a different manufacturer for the printer and the developer such that it wouldn't automatically feed from one to the other. So the printer dumped it's outputs in to boxes mounted on the wall of a darkroom and would wait for someone to go in and manually feed it in to the developer.

It was glorious.

If anyone ever gets the chance to go on an open-day or tour of the noisy end of a newspaper or large print shop, i'd totally recommend it.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#26

Post by icambron »

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…

Focus on selling what, and to whom?

Remember, they were selling one-time licenses, not subscriptions, so 95% market share means 95% of users had their product, not that they sold something to 95% of them that year. One of the biggest challenges about being a dominant player is actually that you mostly compete against the previous version of your products. "Why should I upgrade? This isn't any better than the edition I bought last year." So the business isn't fighting to get that last 5% of the share; that only allows it to grow a measly 5%. Instead, it has to focus very strongly on finding ways to make its existing customer base give it more money. And you do that by improving your products and services so that you can get existing customers to buy more of them. It's the only lever you really have, so doing almost anything else is crazy.

And here's a company failing to even address existing concerns with its products, so it's hard to construct a story on how it was acting rationally. It's not even clear how much money it was even making; how well did those new versions sell, given that they didn't seem to improve much? So I submit that even on a short-term basis, they weren't acting rationally at all.

Not to mention the long-term basis. You should note that Quark was privately held, so the stuff about the stock market doesn't apply here. One of the big advantages of being private is that you can play the long game. But they weren't! If you're not making your customers happy, someone else will. It's easy to blame the environment, but the environment was actually giving them all kinds of feedback about what they should be doing and it's the environment that allowed a competitor to come in and eat their lunch.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#27

Post by copperheart »

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…

Our shop is still using CS6 and we have no plans to upgrade to CC. There is no compelling reason to do so, and financially it doesn't make sense for us to join. For the rare times when a customer submits artwork created in CC, we simply ask them to re-save it in CS6 format.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#28

Post by carterparks »

I witnessed this turnover first hand when I was hired on as a customer service representative at the launch of QuarkXPress 5. This was a major release given that they hadn't released a major version for 5 years! Hilariously enough, we were trained to tout OS X support... via Rosetta. Native support didn't come until QXP6.

While I do think the major reason why Quark failed was due to a lack of a native OSX app, I think there's another major reason... Creative Suite.

The vast majority of desktop publishing users required Photoshop and the pricing difference between Photoshop and Creative Suite was much less than adding (or even upgrading) QuarkXPress. There's also the integration between CS apps that Quark couldn't compete with.

On a sidenote, people have mentioned how Quark was sold to Fred Ebrahimi and he outsourced the vast majority of the engineering staff to India, but did you know he also created Quark City? http://www.quarkcity.com/

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#29

Post by interstitial »

Quark's postmortem comes up a lot, having been in the publishing trenches I see it differently: Quark bet heavily on interactive CD-ROMS as the future, not the internet. They developed cross-compilation from print to interactive CD-ROMs. In a betamax vs. VHS war, the interactivity of CD-ROMs lost to the horrible and graphically disastrous web 0.9beta. Somehow this is forgotten when gurus want to classify every business story according to pet-theories of success and failure. Could you be betting on the wrong future?

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#30

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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