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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?"
According to a friend who works at Quark (and is busy trying to find a more secure job), the dude's got testicular cancer. :o
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
assuming they ported to OSX "properly" there should be no problems.
AFAIK they're software has no reason to make direct hardware calls, so the hardware change should be transparent to them, as long as the OS APIs don't change.
-nB
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Quark is as good as dead, and has been since InDesign 2.0 came out. Their customer service has always been terrible, they're more concerned about being hyper-vigilant about anyone violating their licensing than they are helping out paying customers. They were way too slow to release an OS X native version. The product itself has always been pretty solid and powerful, but they're still too tied to print output and haven't come along with the rest of the world on this whole internet medium thing.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Publishing companies and newspapers switch over very very slowly ... You've got 50 year old lead designers who'd rather you cut off their arm before making them learn new software. I'm working at a newspaper with none other then Quark Xpress, and having used both indesign and pagemaker ... It's absolutely atrocious. I work bad hours as it is, but it consistently crashes once a week, invariably at 2:00 right before we should be heading out and the paper should be at the press. I'm pushing for a move to Scribus, though I doubt it's up to task yet, and I know GIMP is no where near photoshop (though I personally use it for everything, it's missing fundamental cmyk stuffs that make adobe a must-have ... though I have to hand it to Adobe, for a near monopoly they make damn fine products)
Everyone knew OS X was coming, and every major application had a version released either at the time of OS X's release, or shortly thereafter.
Except Quark. People were forced to continue to use the OS 9 version, and it was during this period that Adobe took the lead. They took far too much time to release a new version. This time around, at least according to Apple, compiling a new version can be done within days. And I'm sure Quark will still manage to blow it.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
I know that seems like a huge stream of venom, but honestly, can anyone disagree? They're as bad as Commodore was in the late stages.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
it's a little off topic, but i've actually purchased
/// for my Apple ///, //e - as well as the //e.
Quark products...like 20 years ago.
I owned a copy of Word Juggler
and later had a version for the
Quark Catalyst desktop/file manager for the Apple
I hear they sorta went into the typesetting/ Desktop Publishing/ photo editing bees-nest once they shifted to Macintosh products - well, good luck widdat.
Not too many software companies can boast that they're still around after 20+ years.
And remember, their customer-hostile policies were directly driven by this ass of a CEO. He's the one that allegedly said "All customers are liars, thieves, and bastards" in an exec meeting. Everyone was screaming for an OS X version of Quark it took them how many years to come out with one? You can certainly make a point that Quark was the biggest obstructionist in OS X's adoption by keeping the publishing company on hold. Good riddance. Without this guy, maybe a Intel Mac version of Quark will be released in a reasonable time.
WORD!
My company made the decision to move to Adobe InDesign inspite of a tremendous technical investment to stay based, IMO, entirely on the ridiculous price Quark expects for their tool. (The one program cost more than the entire AdobeCS at the time of the decision.) I think it's a case of them over-valuing themselves and essentially abusing the almost-monopoly they once had. (And thanks to the BSA, my company is also reducing the use of Microsoft software at every opportunity as well... it's a slow and careful process.)
I don't care how big and important you become. Don't piss off your customers.
*Apple* was forced to continue making and shipping old G4s that could run OS9, mainly so people could keep using Quark. The company really has no direction, nor does it seek to satisfy the needs of their clients.
when our agency switched to indesign, i decided the best thing to do was to just deal with the pain of switching at once and get onboard. i haven't looked back since. there are some things that quark does well (some of the hotkeys are still better). but we were the first large-scale roll-out of indesign for a whole creative department and production studio. nearly every art director and production artist had sworn off quark altogether within a few months.
quark is this decades syquest. believe you can fleece your customers forever with unreasonably high prices, very little innovation and a big fat monopoly and it will bite you in the ass. quark used to cost more than the whole adobe creative suite (might still if i even cared enough to look it up).
I work in digital color management, and Quark's CM is unusable. Well, not quite unusable, just horrible. We've never been able to figure out what it's doing with ICC profiles. The best you can do is let a RIP do it all and hope Quark doesn't do anything weird upstream.
Problem is, so many prepress houses have used Quark for so long, they're stuck with it until they get up the gumption to undergo what may be a painful migration to InDesign.
With all the delays in OS compatibility, the color management nightmare, and all the other problems that have been metioned elsewhere, I can't imagine using it. They act as if they hate their customers.
A lot of people dis Quark becuase of that Mac issue. As if every corporation hasn't had an executive who spouted off something out of anger. I'm not defending him so much that I'm pointing out that he was under enough pressure that I think anyone would be frustrated. Even though OSX was a great thing for Apple, it created nightmares for thousands.
Quark in a lot of areas is better as a previous poster went into detail on. Adobe's commercial and educational prices have creeped up in the last couple years. Quarks has gone down. The InDesign XML hype isn't really that great. And Quark is definitely less bloated then Adobe stuff, even if the type doesn't look as good on screen.
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Franlkly, Quark lost when InDesign 2.0 came out. Since then, the upgrade path has widely been considred to be Quark 4 -> InDesign 2 -> InDesign CS . Quark 6 ? Yeah .... I heard they released that.
One of the biggest reasons for that is probably that Quark 4 -> Quark 6 and Quark 5 -> Quark 6 upgrades used to cost more than a new copy of InDesign. This, guys, is a really bad plan for keeping marketshare.
Quark's prices have plummeted, but even so all they really have going for them is that most designers are more familiar with Quark. Their technology is embarrassingly inferior in features, reliability, and pretty much everything else.
To top it off, Quark hasn't lost it's customer-hostile attitude to sales and support. Adobe will listen to you, and might even act on what you say. You don't get that from Quark. They pissed off a lot of customers while they had them locked in, and now those customers are jumping ship as fast as they can.
In short ... if I was the Quark CEO, I'd be looking for other work too. Unless the company pulls their head out in a hurry, I'd expect them to lose more than just their CEO.
I find your comments very interesting. I'ts the first I've heard of really solid areas that Quark does things better, but I can see what you mean. I'll have to investigate those areas with the layout staff at work and see how they feel.
Quark's probably going to get replaced at work soon, because I just can't get it to do simple things right. The single biggest problem is it's handling of EPS and PDF. Save as EPS is buggy, and doesn't embed TrueType fonts even when told to. Placing PDFs on the page is a screaming nightmare - we now use Acrobat to convert them all to EPS instead. For my work, those are MAJOR problems.
I first reported the EPS problem to Quark not long after Quark 4.0 came out, and from what I hear it's still isn't fixed in Quark 6. Why haven't I checked? Because the last Quark demo I downloaded to test HAD SAVE AS EPS *DISABLED*. Yeah... way to let your customers test your software.
Frankly, even if InDesign has some serious issues, I'm inclned to jump ship just so I don't have to deal with Quark anymore. They've been arrogant and unpleasant to deal with, it's hard to buy their software in Australia without paying massive markups to exclusive distributors, and they just don't seem to care what their customers want. At least their prices have been forced down by Adobe, though.
As someone who spent from 88-94 dealing with Xpress 5hrs+ a day, those pricks can't die fast enough to suit me. No - I take that back. I want them to suffer a slow, painful, humiliating death. Drag it out so that Macrodobe does get fat and arrogant too fast. Try calling their customer "service" and look forward to being trated like a criminal. Wait and wait and wait for an OS upgrade that isn't worth a crap. Pay for multiple film outputs because their color management blows chunks. If it weren't for the momentum they had with service bureaus and Pagemaker dropping the ball back around 1990, their customer base would have abandoned them ages ago.
I still haven't upgraded from Quark 3.3. Yes, I'm on an old-world Mac. But for text and normal graphics, it's the best thing out there. The amount of control you have is amazing, and you can produce some seriously professional looking documents (ie, books).
Alas, I'm no long a typesetter, so I don't use Quark nearly as much as I used to. I haven't tried Scribus, and LaTeX is just too fiddly with these archane commands.
There's one hardware call any program is entitled to make: to the FPU. If the Quark programmers came up with some neat tricks using the FPU on the 68000-series to speed redraw or something, then that code will break into tiny jagged pieces on a 601. The first series of PowerPC chips didn't have FPUs. They didn't really need one as the CPU was 'good enough' at floating-point math. But not in such a way that a codebase relying on an FPU can be ported short of a complete re-write. It's also possible to use floating-point math without explicitly using the FPU, but the code is very different.
Claris killed ClarisCAD for just this reason. Which was a shame, coming from AutoCAD I considered the Claris product to be superior in interface (if a no-show in the power and programmability categories) and a pleasure to draw with. When they announced that it would never make it to PowerPC I died a little inside. I've been avoiding vector-illustration work ever since as a sort of protest.
Claris had some deep hackers, they loooved that old-school Motorolla FPU. I once discovered that Filemaker Pro 3 was blindingly fast at text calculations (oxymoron) because it mapped the functions to the FPU somehow. I established when I resolved an annoyingly subtle bug in a FileMaker database. It was a calculation of the last four digits of a social security number (stored as text). On the HR manager's machine (running a 68040) this invariably returned thefirst three but not the very last digit. Perfectly repeatable, no other machine would do it. Cloned her system to another machine - no bug. I ran TechTool. Nothing wrong but an FPU error. I opened it up... and some of the heatsink glue had run down onto the CPU pins... the ones for the FPU. The databse was using purely text data and purely text functions, but floating point functions were involved. 90% of all programmers, at least, would never consider representing text internally as anything other than, well, text. And it was a brave project manager who let it happen.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I pray that Quark will finally release the source code, or at least sell it cheaply, of mTropolis, the multimedia tool that was rated as the best thing out there ever. That way it could finally get moved to modern platforms, such as WinXP, OSX and Linux. Quark, in Fred "The Iranian bastard" Ibrahimi's infinite wisdom, bought the product from mFactory, then spent about a year developing a new version but never doing any marketing or advertising whatsoever, and then killed the product outright, claiming that not enough people were buying it.
The stupid bastards then refused to release or sell the code at a decent price (They wanted over a milllion plus final control of any later product and a guarantee that user would no longer swear and curse at Quark in public for being the bunch of stupid greedy blind fuckups that they are). That situation never changed, and even though Quark finally got rid of Ibrahimi (may his soul burn in hell for all eternity, or better yet, may he have to answer user support calls in hell for all eternity), nothing has changed.
Quark is still just as dumb and stupid and greedy as they always were.
Maybe it is because Apple is switching again. The last switch (OS9 to OSX) didn't do Quark much good. Maybe this guy is seeing the storm coming and decides to get out before he gets wet.
I really don't give a damn about Quark, but I am a developer, and if you stop and think what you're asking from them, it's pretty unfair. Let's say you've spend 15 years or so developing a stable product for a single OS. Over that time, your application has become the standard tool for it job, and enourmously complex and powerful. Then the OS changes. How long should it take to turn that Aircraft carrier around? A couple of years to get back to wear you were is reasonable from a my perspective. But customers get impatient, and during that time your competitors who had less code to port and test get a head start.
This doesn't even take into account the question of when you time the transition to OSX. You have to guess not only if and when it will be stable and popular, but when your customers are going to make the switch. Not everyone is an early adopter.