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How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

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51–60 of 71 posts

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#51

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 busine…

Having been around when Quark started to fall behind and then switching to InDesign myself, I don't agree with you. QuarkXPress was crap, and Quark had no interest in modernizing their software. It took forever just to get native OS X support, and the software lacked a lot of InDesign's print publishing features. Desktop publishing has always been a Mac-centric affair, and ignoring Mac users was a pretty poor decisio…

A quark user could smoke an InDesign user, mintues vs hours. High pressure, high speed design is still not matched by InDesign today. But there is very little high speed design left. Of course, InDesign is wonderful now.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#52
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…

Thanks for taking the time to write that up, very interesting and well-written.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#53
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 worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist.

We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy.

When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very light coloured wax offered the same adhesion as glue but allowed you to move the photos and type around, and was invisible to the stat camera.

The wax machine was half the fun - two rollers, one rolling through hot wax, would grab the paper or photo from the back, roll hot wax onto the bottom surface, and deposit it on the other side ready for placement.

The second most fun tool was the stat camera, which allowed you to resize photo or type by physically moving the photo or type from the camera lens, or allow you to put a halftone filter over a black and white photo to allow for single colour printing.

What used to require a team of 40 people - ad layout designers, line workers, typesetters - to handle six weekly magazine could probably be done by one person now.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#54
post #33
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 don't have a point, just thought I'd add a little first hand history. Your anecdote is much better than the article I submitted.

actually, i felt the submitted article was the best thing i've read on HN all week. thanks for posting it.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#55
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 worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist. We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy. When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very…

> When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX.

We used to use a rubbery glue called Cow Gum. It too was repositionable and invisible to the camera. I haven't seen it for years, gone the way of Letraset probably, but it was good stuff. The raging solvent-fume headaches after a day of pasting up were not so good though.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#56

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 reve…

The first question here is why there's a maximum speed you would like to be going. If you keep accelerating, you'll get there even faster! It's also not inherently unsustainable to make ever increasing amounts of money, because the economy can grow with you; it's not a zero sum game.

That said, you're right that a lot of companies totally bone themselves trying to grow unsustainably, letting the stability of their company (like customer happiness, employee retention, that sort of thing) fall apart in the meantime, and then collapse under their own weight. While I think the parent is wrong about how it applies to Quark, they're quite right that the incentives for short-term growth are driven by how the stock market works. It may have even tilted our whole business culture to worship growth regardless of context.

Here's how it works. Let's assume a simplified version of the stock market in which stocks are priced based on the current performance of the company [1]. So let's say I buy stock at IBM today for $188/share. IBM makes fucktons of money, which is great for IBM but useless to me. It's useless to me because that's what determined the price in the first place, so if it keeps on making the same number of fucktons then the price is going to stay at $188 and my money is just sitting out there doing nothing for me. What I need to happen is for the stock to be worth, say $200 so I can sell it and make some money. So I need IBM to grow. As much as possible. In fact, it's the only thing I care about, because after I sell the stock I don't care what happens to the company. So I vote to put people on the board who want to grow the company and they hire executives with that mandate (who are anyway paid in part with stock and thus have the same incentive) and the whole corporate culture aspires to growth at all costs. If they said "well guys, this year growth isn't really going to work and will probably just sink the ship, so we're going to spend our time making our customers happy and pocketing our billions in profits" everyone would sell the stock, the board would be fired, etc. So that's why you have to grow. [2]

[1] That's not really how it works; expectations of future growth are baked into the current price. Sort of. The relationship between a company's performance, growth, dividends, and the overall economy is complicated, but it doesn't really change the point much, which is that as an investor, you want the stock price to go up, and to do that, you need as much growth as possible.

[2] Following on from [1], there's the argument that in a world with perfect information and rational actors, if the expected future growth is priced in, then sacrificing long term sustainability for short term growth wouldn't raise the price. But we don't live in that world.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#57
post #16

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 t…

I worked at a prepress & design company (in prepress) that used Quark. I had time to kill every now and then so decided to start reading and working through the InDesign 2 instruction manual (actual printed manual). I'd learn something and small and think "holy shit, this might actually be a wonderful application". It gave those tear to eye of joy type of moments constantly (something I don't get much with just about anything anymore). So I worked on getting the designers to switch. They were skeptical and at first mildly unwilling because it would interrupt their workflow but were eventually forced to by our studio manager. Their attitudes changed very quickly despite the pains of learning a new app and dropping something that they were masters of. Anyway, while I had a rep for being quite technical and quick to learn stuff, they all had quite a few years experience more than me and were faster with the keyboard (I was no slouch). Switching to InDesign leveled the playing field dramatically for me, it was at that company where I think I went from juniorish/intermediate to senior level mac op within about a year or less. I decided to learn the native shortcuts because it was obvious that this was the app of the future. The designers used the Quark shortcuts but probably learned the native ones eventually. Well, one hopes anyway. Doing web application development now of course, can't stand prepress which has quite a low glass ceiling and is quite depressing really.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist. We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy. When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very…

> When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. We used to use a rubbery glue called Cow Gum. It too was repositionable and invisible to the camera. I haven't seen it for years, gone the way of Letraset probably, but it was good stuff. The raging solvent-fume headaches after a day of pasting up were not so good though.

Wax was great because it was non-toxic, quick drying and smelled good.

You just had to make sure not to wax things twice because it gunked up the machine!

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#59
post #49
post #20

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 b…

Fascinating. There's been lots of recent discussion about problems with the Wii U launch by Nintendo. One of the interesting things to come out of it: Pre-launch American third party companies kept asking Nintendo about how the networking system would work, referencing XBOX Live and Sony's offerings as examples. Would it be on-par, or similar in features, or totally different? Nintendo responded by asking the third p…

I remember reading that. I love Nintendo, but not only was that line incredibly sad, but it spoke volumes about my experience with Nintendo's software in recent years (outside single player games). It rang too true.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#60
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 worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist. We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy. When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very…

You've jogged my memory and are correct. I remember a hot wax roller that sat in a reservoir of some kind, and little wax sticks about the size or 3 sticks of chewing gum or so.

I think there was also several kinds of adhesive tapes used for some of the work with different patterns on them as well.

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