Slashdot Mirror
Quark CEO Abruptly Resigns
stonydell writes "According to News.com, Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company. Company spokesman Glen Turpin also said, 'We hope to find a new CEO as soon as possible. It's very important we bring in some professional outside leadership to the company.' Does Quark still have a future or is the future Adobe and Macromedia?"
Quark doesn't have present, much less a future. They've been passed (and lapped a couple of times) by InDesign long ago. Their delays in keeping up with OS compatibility; their stubornly shipping software with keydisk floppies long after Apple stopped selling machines with floppy drives; they're not the only game in town and frankly, they're not the best game in town, so if they're gone, I for one won't miss them.
They blew it last time around. They had a wonderful product, but you can only screw your customers so many times before they start to get mad.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Adobe and Macromedia should help in the search. Has the FTC approved the Adobe's purchase of Macromedia? If Quark goes under or looks like it's gonna, the FTC is going to have a hard time approving Adobe's and Macromedia's merger.
Quark is not dead, or dying, at least not in a rapid fashion. They are however, not a vibrant company at all. It will take a long time to kill off Quark. There are still tons of publishing houses that are dependent on Quark, notably because of all of the Xtensions that allow a company to customize the program for their needs. And it's a tested solution. I work at a newspaper, and the entire place, save for less than a dozen machines, is running Quark. (The machines with InDesign are not involved with the production of the newspaper. One of them is dedicated to converting InDesign ad files sent from agencies.) We have quite a few people who have been with the company for 30+ years, and the only reason they are using Quark is because they had to learn it to keep their job. They had to learn from scratch, and every upgrade has meant a lot of headaches. The company is not eager to re-train designers on another program. So, despite the constant urging of IT, we aren't switching to InDesign. We're still running OS9 and will run Quark 6 when we're on OS X.
But what is happening out there is a lot of design agencies, who aren't so confined and often have more computer-savvy designers, are moving to InDesign in droves. It offers far more creative freedom and the ability to import the working files is a big plus. (Now if we could get them to use the Acrobat Distiller instead of saving InDesign PDFs... but I digress.) This is going to take away a large chunk of Quark's user base.
Myself, I'm thinking of starting a small design business, and which way am I going? InDesign. I could pay $900 for Quark, or I can pay $1200 and get InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. This points to another of Quark's problems - they can't compete with Adobe on features, and they sure as hell can't compete on price. Add to that their bad reputation concerning customer service, and they have got a real problem. Many customers are glad they've finally got an alternative, and they're jumping ship.
So Quark is not dead, but they will be in the not-too-distant future unless they start doing three things:
1. Innovate. Bring new things to the table instead of relying on the past and copying features.
2. Respond to the current market. If they let the same thing happen with the Intel/Apple switchover that they did with OS X, Adobe will eat them alive.
3. Take care of their customers, instead of treating them as thieves and ignoring concerns. Price products at a reasonable point, and maybe you'll see a little less piracy. Not enough, but a few percentage points' drop can mean a lot of money.
If they don't do this, they will be dead, especially as the folks in the design field get more computer-savvy and know that they can get a better product.
* Pioneered 40+ alphanumeric registration code printed as a single block in highly condensed type. No, it's not a big thing, but a great introduction to their general attitude.
* When the Mac moved from 68k to the PowerPC chip, companies started producing fat binaries of programs that worked on both kinds of machines. ALL of the major Mac companies did this... except Quark, which released a separately priced PPC-alone version.
* In 2002 then-head of Quark Fred Ebrahimi said at a Quark "executive summary" that "the Macintosh platform is shrinking" and anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else" although moving to InDesign would be "suicide."
* Dragged their feet on an OS X version until Steve Jobs could joke about "holdouts" and everybody knew who he was talking about. They were dead last transitioning to OS X, and the 6.0 upgrade had nothing new from 5 other than OS X compatibility.
* Killed their own user-to-user forum around the time of the 6 release (it's back now)
* If you run a small LAN and can't afford site licensing, you'll love Quark 6's paranoid active registration. Beyond the arcane installation, the rights are for a single machine, not single user! The registration is hardware-specific: if your hard drive crashes, or if you clone your system to a new drive, you have to reactivate the software. For our group, using automated activation didn't work for three of five upgrades, and I wound up on the phone begging Bangalore for activation numbers. I now slate an hour of frustration for each upgrade or reinstall of this program.
* Quark 6 still doesn't play nice with PDFs. PDFs are now the industry standard, but we've experienced various strangeness in Quark's direct PDF output and can't trust it for high-end jobs.
So why are people still using it? In our case, backlog of files. We have InDesign CS and are using it for new work and pickups. Quark would be in the dumpster except for old jobs. Going back now because they might mend their ways? Too little, too late.
My boss knows my long-time disgust with Microsoft, and once asked which I hated more, Microsoft or Quark? It stopped me cold, and I finally just had to say "Yes."