Slashdot Mirror
Apple Bundles InDesign With Power Macs
analog_line writes "Apple is firing a shot across the bow of Quark with a new promotion bundling Adobe InDesign 2.0 with every new PowerMac G4 (that is, the towers). News.com has a story on this as well. I say go Apple. Hopefully this will either get Quark to release their Mac OS X version of XPress or start the process of killing them off once and for all." I really liked QuarkXPress a lot when I used it extensively back in the version 3 days. It'd be a shame if it they lose out on Apple's new platform. But as a capitalist, I say, let the best product win!
Agreed, this really isn't symbolic of capitalism at all. This is Apple sending Quark a message, no more, no less. And frankly, I'm glad. Quark has been pissing on Mac users for years, so it's about time they were bitchslapped. However, it is rather "Microsoftian" of Apple, so I apologize for being a hypocrite, but I think Apple's decision is the lesser of two evils.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I've been a Quark loyalist for years, and almost took a job with them last year. I'm so glad I didn't, because since then: 1) They've moved most of their programming to India. 2) They've fired some of their sales reps around Chicagoland. 3) One of their big guns as far as keeping corporate customers happy has left Quark and started a company that consults businesses migrate from QuarkXPress to InDesign. I'm losing faith in Quark by the minute. Version 5 was a complete waste of time. Luckily, 50 percent of my job consists of simply trying to keep QuarkXPress running on 60 machines without crashing. Another 30 percent is spent restoring jobs from backup that got corrupted when QuarkXPress crashed, and the last 20 percent is figuring out how our in-house asset management system can be modified to work with InDesign instead of QuarkXPress...
InDesigns's market share is tiny, and no one's really adopting it.
Been to a newspaper or magazine lately? Since the release of version 2.0, InDesign has come to own that market. For good reason, IMHO.
In addition, the first thing any serious design, production or prepress firm does upon recieving a new machine is nuke the drive and install their own build.
You, like pretty much everybody else here, seem to be under the mistaken impression that InDesign is going to be pre-installed on new Macs, like iTunes. That's not right at all. If you buy a G4 between now and the end of the year, you can mail Adobe a coupon and they'll send you a copy of InDesign for free. If you don't want it, don't send in the coupon. On the other hand, if you like getting expensive things for free....