As the big dog of desktop publishing in the ’80s and ’90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.
I don’t know I’ve seen so many professionals that relied on an application, hate the app and company as much as Quark.
um, adobe?
Back in the 90s, I wanted Quark to send a brochure on one of their new (and like all their products other than XPress, soon to fail) products, and I had to give them my serial number before they would send me their own promotional material.
Unreal.
Back when I was in graphic design I was forced to use QuarkXPress. In the last two-years of that career, I started working with our vendors to support Adobe InDesign. My old colleagues haven’t used QuarkXPress in years, and I am happy to say I had a part in that.
I relied on Xpress 3.1 as much as I’ve ever relied on any application professionally. I developed my company’s first catalog on it using one of the original PowerMacs (6100), and all marketing campaigns. I should have loved the app, but I hated it because I detested Quark. Their support was rude and arrogant. When InDesign was finally released, I immediately jumped ship and never looked back.
Suckers, why isn’t Quark dead yet, already? Adobe, too, has also adopted a hostile posture toward it’s customers. I’ll be happier when they both kill over for good.
This story has many errors:
Some of the features it says QuarkXPress lacked it actually had, like a pen tool and the ability to change the attributes of multiple objects.
Some of the killer InDesign features, like GREP and nested styles debuted several versions in, after InDesign had already established dominance.
It ignores one of InDesign’s early advantages: it was free. Most studios using QuarkXPress used Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and GoLive or Dreamweaver, which were cheaper when purchased as the Creative Suite. The suite included InDesign, making its purchase effectively cost nothing.
By far InDesign’s greatest advantage was a lack of legacy baggage. Adobe started with an extensive feature list: PageMaker, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, FreeHand, and a combined wish list. With no existing package to shoehorn features onto they could start from scratch and build the program we wanted. You want to build the highest building in the world. Do you build it in a hole in the ground or on top of the Empire State Building?
The article specifically makes mention of the fact that, as part of the CS suite with Photoshop and Illustrator, it was practically free and worked as a trojan horse. Not sure that qualifies as “ignoring InDesign’s early advantage.”
I’m really not sure if Adobe’s win is really a good thing.
Well, a better way to put it is to say another monopoly wasn’t a good thing. At the time, InDesign was a true Godsend. What would have been best is if it had invigorated Quark and we had 2 highly competitive products re what Android did for the iPhone/iOS. It’s for this reason I use Aperture and Pixelmator now, rather than Adobe products, whenever possible.
I missed that as I read this across two devices and must have skipped that paragraph.
There were many stories like this. David Pogue told me a story at the time of a man in Miami who had his home wiped about by Hurricane Andrews. Although he had a backup of his computer, he lost all of his software installation disks and manuals. Some people may be too young to remember software manuals, but they used to be HUGE and very important in the pre-Internet era.
He contacted various software companies for replacements (he had his serial numbers and registration info) and they all helped him out, with the exception of Quark. They told him he had to buy another copy at full price. No manual, no replacement disk, no help, nothing. Truly a company ripe for a rival to attack.
I remember there was a version, 4.0 I think, that had a very unreasonable upgrade price. Quark justified — I should say rationalized — this by saying it combined two upgrades in one. 3.1 was 68k only, but 3.2 was fat, with native PPC support. 4.0 was also fat, so upgrading from 3.1 got you the version upgrade as well as native PPC support. Of course, if you were still using a Quadra and had no use for PPC you still paid the same.
For years, even after version 6 shipped, I rarely saw a Quark shop that was running anything above 4.1.
I don’t know about Aperture, even Marco Arment uses Lightroom instead because of Aperture’s stagnation.
I think Adobe’s monopoly is worse and their way of segmenting customers is really stupid. Creative Cloud? Common. Their only stronghold is that I have yet to find a tool that fully support all the things I do. Unfortunately, I am not a fulltime artist. I just do artist work occasionally for my company. Dilemma.
I second @Val1s’s nomination of Adobe. Illustrator is a bag of hurt, especially compared to a now-ancient copy of FreeHand. I despise it every time I have to use it. I have had far more problems with Adobe than I have had with Quark and I have been customers of both companies for 20+ years (I currently own QXP 9 and CS6). Quark has been better than Adobe for customer service since about 2008, in my experience. It’s why the linked article suggests, “Those last QuarkXPress holdouts don’t seem so shortsighted these days.”
I can’t speak to what Marco Arment uses Lightroom for or what he found especially deficient about Aperture, but Aperture works great for me. I’ve processed over 15,000 RAW images with it in 2013 alone. There are some things I’d like to see Apple do with Aperture, and I’m sure there are some things Lightroom does better, but nothing I’ve found that’s worth scrapping a very productive workflow over.
“I think Adobe’s monopoly is worse”
Believe me, I’m no fan of Adobe, and I can’t stand the new Creative Cloud, but trust me, if you had the displeasure of dealing with Quark in the early 90’s, I’m not sure you’d feel anything could be worse. They were a horrible company who used their DTP monopoly in the worst possible way.
That’s because versions 5 and 6 didn’t provide much incentive to upgrade. And so 4.11 got older and more crash-prone.
Yeah, I stopped at 4.1 myself, and I remember the ludicrously expensive upgrades to 4.0 which was very disappointing release.
Having only used Lotus Notes for Mac for a short time, I can easily say I’ve never relied heavily on any software whose manufacturer deserved less success than Quark.
Yes, totally agree. Each to his own. I use software that I find useful and suites my needs and not just because someone (important or not) is using it.
I’ll have to say I have not had the displeasure of dealing with Quark in the 90′ but what I mean worse is the fact that Adobe’s tool is really good while Quark’s back then was not so good. I’ve tried other alternatives but there are always minor things that don’t work quite the same. So, I don’t think there is a lack of competition.
Of course one might argue I just don’t know how to use the other software but this is what I have to say. I’ve never been formally trained in using any illustration/drawing/DTP software. I’m not even trained in artistic/creative work. Yet I was able to pickup Adobe’s software with relative ease. I can’t say the same for the other software.
I think the last version I had to use was 8. I was excited to see how much they learned from InDesign, then disappointed by how little that was.
Layers: yes, it supported layers, but not on the master page.
Docked palettes: The default position for the palettes made it appear they were docked, but they were not.
Master pages: virtually no change. I was a fan of InDesign’s hybrid master pages from day one. Like PageMaker, master items were locked, inaccessible, and below page objects. Like QuarkXpress they could be selected (with command-click) and, so long as they weren’t moved, still linked to the attributes of the master page object. QuarkXpress has always put all master page items onto the page so they are selectable. This causes confusion and makes marquee selecting impossible.
I think Adobe isn’t quite in Quark territory yet, but they’re doing their very best getting there as quickly as possible. I think they might achieve this goal this year.
“Lotus Notes for Mac” could be the most frightening four words in the English language.
It was unpleasant, to say the least. Thank heaven the art director agreed.
Two words: Lotus Notes