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?"
as the summary insinuates, they'll likely have a new CEO soon, that of Adobe or Macromedia.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Strange.
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.
I did when I was reading their website:
Paving the way for custom publishing in a multiple-channel environment with industry-leading design, page layout, publishing, enterprise workflow, personalization, and content management software.
--Greg
They still have a future, albeit it's winding down. There's still enough designers and print houses out there using Quark in their workflow that they'll be around for a bit more, but I can't see them growing any more.
Their biggest problem was not getting Quark to OS X fast enough. Quark used to be one of the killer apps for the Mac platform - Adobe got Photoshop there, but Quark took far too long, and Adobe got them with PageMaker/InDesign.
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.
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 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!
Testicular cancer is one of those cancers that can be caught and treated successfully if found early. Unfortunately, it's not exactly one of those tests that you so willingly sign up for. You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late. It's a lot like prostate cancer in that regard.
Good luck to this guy.
to hear that Quark was still around. It is not a name I have heard in about 5 years.
'Same speed C but faster'
Quark is the proprietor of Quark's. RTFA?
With Quark out of the way, his brother Rom can take over.
http://www.dmwright.com/html/ferengi.htm
rules of acquisition
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.
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.
Weak.
QuarkVsInDesign.com is an interesting site for desktop publishing professionals, run by one "Pariah S. Burke," that covers the rivalry between the programs. As you can see from the many comments on this March 29th thread, Quark : Postcards From the Edge, the animosity toward Quark has grown pervasive.
The Grand Nagus will be displeased.
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.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
your opinion might be that quark is vastly superiot indesign. but the transition is happening whether you like it or not. i'm a freelancer, which means i'm in a lot of different agencies and nearly all of them are at LEAST dual platform. many of the larger ad corporations have let their quark licenses lapse and just bought creative suite.
to say that "you know nothing abou the design industry" if you believe indesign is making strong inroads is just asinine. of the 8 agencies i've worked in this year only one of them still uses quark exclusively.
The only good Quarks are the one that owns the bar on a space station, and the one that captained a space garbage truck and had identical blonde twins (okay, one was a clone of the other one) as crew. Any other Quark with a capital Q is dead to me. Dead, I tell you.
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.
One organization I have ties to used to have separate camps of Quark and PageMaker users (pretty weird as it was a rather small organization!) but last September decided to ditch both in favor of InDesign, partly because it was easier to just pick up Creative Suite.
Yes, some old-timers bitched and moaned, but InDesign has worked out well for their modest needs. I've actually thought of trying to reproduce some of their templates in Apple's "Pages" but haven't done so yet.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
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.
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.
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 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.
Parent really is insightful.
I used to be a hardcore Quark user and admin for many years (admined Quark the Quark Publshing System servers, all that workflow jazz). I liked the product. This was all about 5 years ago, just before version 4 came out.
but even back then the company really knew how to annoy their customers. They used to do fabulous stuff like issue point releases that couldn't write backwardly compatible files. Then they would stop selling the older point release.
The result? A department with 30 machines running Quark Xpress 3.5 quite happily would by an additional machine and find that only 3.6 was avaiilable now, and that the cost of updating 30 machines to 3.6 was
a) horrendous
b) Didn't actually give us any functionality that we wanted (it would be something daft like the ability to have gradient filled text or something.
People really really HATED Quark the company, it was quite an achievement to make your customer base loath you that much when the product was fairly solid. This was all before the OS X debacle.
As for Fred moving the company to Wyoming - wrong. He moved it to a little corner of India that was Kamar's hometown - Mohali, near Chandigahr.
Quark's new home is low-tech, even by local standards... and a hard place to convince good programmers to relocate to... when there are better jobs and opportunities in Bangalore, Mumbai, etc.
Like, for example ...?
[...] I had to re-arrange all the pages into a print order myself (Quark does it for you)[...]
LOL. No, InDesign doesn't have an imposer built in. Get a plugin like InBooklet. For soemeone who brags about knowing "the design industry" you are not well informed. And quick, tell me: Why is the company who makes InBooklet, producing imposing software for QuarkXpress as well?
Quark has been spending time trying to make ONE solution for print and web and has been failing horrifically.
They should have kept their focus 100% on just the print end of things and they would be doing just fine.
Printers LOVE the fact that there isn't a new version of Quark every 18 months like with InDesign/Adobe.
* 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."
.. if the company does not make a profit, then the Executive staff does not get paid.
Thereby forcing an even stronger focus on quarterly profits at the expense of long-term strategic planning - 'If I don't make my profit target, I won't get paid, so I better cut costs by firing people and doing more outsourcing - future be damned!'
I agree, tho, that the rest of your comments are right on target.
I once was head of MIS for a consortium of companies in Baltimore. The MIS department shared facilities with the telemarketing company. After the telemarketing company president resigned, it took two and a half months for the board to find a replacement - meanwhile, the company was completely headless. It was a small company of less than 50, with no other management besides an accountant and two senior telemarketiers. The employees started coming to work in jeans, shorts and t-shirts! Our consortium was mostly a banking company so this was 'unthinkable'. They were literally having parties in the office almost every day. On their own initiative, the employees instituted flex-time and other shocking innovations. But they were still working.
I was generating the sales reports for their company - profits for the telemarketing company increased by over 40% for this period!
It all came to an end when the wife of the chairman paid a visit and saw the 'chaos'. I recommended that they do nothing about it, given the profit numbers, but I was laughed at (of course). The board's reasoning: Think how much better profits will be once they get strong management again!
Strong management was hired, and profits quickly sank to their normal levels. The board was predictably mystified by this development.
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
It's been done.
Don Hosek did the first couple of issues of his magazine, _Serif_ using TeX a while back.
The nascent _Free Software Magazine_ is done using LaTeX.
That said, it's important to remember that the limiting factor in TeX usage is human ingenuity (and to a lesser extent available computer processing power --- though pages generate almost instantly for all but the most computationally intensive layouts these days, not like the _minutes_ or even hours it used to take)--- it's a Turing compleat programming language, so it can do anything once one figures out how to explain to TeX how to do it. DH often likened using TeX to playing Chess, requiring an awareness of what would be happening in the future. There has been some interesting work done on expanding this sort of thing though.
By contrast, the limitations of using Quark XPress and InDesign are available manpower/time and computer equipment. One can do anything, but not much can be automated ``merely'' using stylesheets and graphic placement rules. Numbering often is done by hand, (re)generating an index can be especially tedious, cross-references are primitive at best, and equations &c. require special proprietary plug-ins.
FWIW, people who're using InDesign are using TeX to a certain degree --- Adobe licensed URW's HZ hyphenation & justification algorithm which was based on TeX's. Turning things around, pdftex now affords many of Adobe InDesign's H&J features including hanging punctuation and character expansion.
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
affords some interesting examples of what TeX can do.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.