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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?"
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
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!
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
You usually go in for examination when you notice some symptoms and by that point it's already too late.
Yes, people: DO NOT IGNORE IRREGULARITIES IN YOUR NUTS. If you feel pain or growth, go to a doctor. You can be embarassed or you can be dead. Your choice. If you find out early enough, it's no big deal. If you find out mid range, it can plague you for the rest of your live (via relapse), if you find out too late, you're dead. The difference between early and too late can be as little as two to six months.
20-35 year olds be especially vigilant.
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).
The Grand Nagus will be displeased.
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.
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.
* 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."