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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!
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.
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).
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.
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.