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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

#61

Post by bane »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #34
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…

This is all too true. The interesting thing is when companies get into this sort of death spiral you can usually spot it if you look carefully. If you're a competitor with an "800 lb gorilla" which has just entered this territory you have a good shot at killing them if you execute well. I speculate the reason this sort of technique persists though is that the only people who get hurt here are the lower level employee…

I've always been interested in the particular song and dance that's performed during the board meetings to convince them the CEO's blood squeezing strategy is not what's causing the company to noticeably fail.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#62

Post by stan_rogers »

interstitial wrote: post #29

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…

Had it gone that way, they would have been slaughtered by Macromedia's offerings (Authorware and Director). And Macromedia somehow managed to "shock" their tech onto the web when the little disks mostly went away.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#63

Post by 001sky »

ttcbj wrote: post #14
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 modif…

As a side note, I always wondered if the Creative Suite product offering (which bundled ID with photoshop) was just hype or also really got people (especially students) to just forget about Quark. That seemed to happen around the same time, give or take some years of overlapp.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#64

Post by protomyth »

MBCook wrote: 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…

The timeline the CEO gives for Cocoa is full of pooh. It has been a lot longer than 4 years ago that Apple said to use Cocoa over Carbon. 64-bit just forced the issue. Unless you are Microsoft or Adobe, Carbon was a very temporary waypoint as far as Apple was concerned.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#65

Post by cgarrigue »

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…

In my previous job where we developped our own PDF interpreter (neither based on Adobe owns PDF lib or Print Engine) we only needed InDesign in short occasional burst, mainly to produce test files when new PDF features were introduced, or to check some issues reported by customers. Switching to the CC model for us made sense as it saved us money.

And in my current job we only need to use Adobe applications to generate demo files for tradeshows and sometimes private demos. So, we never require a full-time license. And we can use it as an alternative to a floating license as any of us can log in to use one of the application before logging out once finished. However now that I think about it I am not sure whether our marketing team switched to the CC model or have been using CS 5 or 5.5 the whole time. Considering they use it much more often than us it would make sense if they did not use CC.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#66

Post by chris_wot »

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…

VMWare could do well to remember this now they have killed VMware Service Manager.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#67

Post by L_Rahman »

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…

This provided a lot of insight into an area that I knew absolutely nothing about. Thanks for taking the time to type it all out.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#68

Post by whyenot »

danielweber wrote: post #18
smacktoward wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to forget how expensive computers were in this time period. A new high end mac (or PC) could easily set you back $10,000 or more. A Mac IIfx was $8,970-10,970, monitor not included.

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#69

Post by yuhong »

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 dug this out and submitted it to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7194751

Re: How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

#70

Post by ido »

whyenot wrote: post #68
danielweber wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to forget how expensive computers were in this time period. A new high end mac (or PC) could easily set you back $10,000 or more. A Mac IIfx was $8,970-10,970, monitor not included.

You're talking 10-15 years earlier than the time at hand (early 2000s). By then computers were already pretty cheap.
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