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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!
But as a capitalist, I say, let the best product win!
But if Apple bundles the product wouldn't that give a distinct advantage to Adobe without regards to whether they have a better product? This to me is just Apple's way of slapping Quark's wrist and rewarding Adobe, who aside from Microsoft is Apple's biggest software producer.
I love competition. Look at graphics cards: ATI has just overtaken nVidia, who overtook 3dfx, who overtook Matrox, who overtook ATI ... The big winner is the citizen with her wallet, getting an order of magnitude performance increase, for similar cost, every couple years.
I started doing desktop publishing with PageMaker 4, which was right before Quark started to really kick their butts in PC-land. Adobe bought PageMaker from Aldus, who'd invested a lot of effort in working with designers and creating a great product. Adobe got complacent and sat on their ass, with the result that Quark crossed platforms and ate their lunch. Now they're coming back with InDesign, which has some great features and usability enhancements that Quark can't touch (OS X support aside).
Another thing helping Adobe is their frankly brilliant positioning of PDF. The network effect of PDF is huge - many print shops are taking files in PDF for complex jobs, and our local paper (The Oregonian - not high class, but not little) asks for ads in PDF. PS is still the standard, but PDF is a nice intermediary. Adobe's turning it into the XML of page layout and design.
Random thought: Artistic and design tools is the one of the hardest areas for OSS to compete, because these programs (like Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, etc.) are all about interface and polish. I'm not saying that OSS can't do this, just that it takes a strong vision and committed management to pull off this type of software.
Anyone want to lay odds on Adobe porting it's suite to Linux? OS X support could pull that argument in either direction.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
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...
If what people are used to would prevent them from switching to anything different the world would be pretty boring. Its not like the switch from InDesign to Quark is hard to do. You can change the InDesign shortcuts to the Quark layout if you want to. Importing XPress files into ID works pretty good (So far it worked perfect for me, but the documents I tried it on were not that complex).
If your Printer wont accept either InDesign or PDF files then find one that is allready comfortable with the new millenium. Converting XPress files into PDFs is a nightmare. Exporting ID to PDF is flawless.
If you are comfortable with the other Adobe products (every designer should at least know Photoshop) then getting used to the UI is trivial. And the interface is really intuitive. Working with InDesign sometimes really feels to me as if the application has got some kind of "Do What I Want" functionality. XPress allways made me feel like a sucker with no way out.
Apple bundling this software will give desing shops an incentive to check it out (if they didnt get it in the latest Adobe Design Collection anyway) and see that it truly is a better product.
Hank! White!
When was the last time you saw a commercial for BSD?
Just a couple of minutes ago, actually.
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....