“As the big dog of desktop publishing in the ’80s and ’90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing,” Dave Girard writes for Ars Technica. “But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.”
“Quark’s demise is truly the stuff of legend,” Girard writes. “In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and… uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.”
“Quark repeatedly failed to make OS X-native versions of XPress—spanning versions 4.1, 5, and 6—but the company still asked for plenty of loot for the upgrades,” Girard writes. “With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, ‘The Macintosh platform is shrinking.’ Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment should ‘switch to something else.'”
“It’s advice people apparently took—just not the way he meant it. It was likely that Quark saw increasing growth in Windows sales as a sign that the Mac publishing market was dwindling. However, what they were probably seeing was new users, not migration to Windows,” Girard writes. “I’ve heard about Windows-based publishing environments, but I’ve never actually seen one in my 20+ years in design and publishing.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Quark got what Quark deserved.
Ignoring – or worse, dissing – the Mac, especially when you’re a maker of publishing software, no less, is suicide.
We are Mac users. We never forget and – call us crazy – when all is said and done, we will be the last ones standing. Take that to the bank.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
[Attribution: Daring Fireball. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Quark CEO Ebrahimi apologizes for ‘being late’ with QuarkXpress for Mac OS X – June 11, 2003
Dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment? Quark CEO says ‘switch to something else’ – November 25, 2002
I’m still using QuarkXPress on an oldish iMac, even though I have all the CS Suite loaded onto my newer iMac, which I got 2 years ago, waiting for me to switch over.
But I still haven’t had the guts and energy to switch to InDesign! I know it’s a waste but I dread changing all my layouts and routine..
The new iMac is only used to check our Facebook page 🙂
I was an expert user of XPress, but I never liked its usability. I waited for version 1.0 of InDesign before I made the jump. At that time it was hard to find a print shop that supported it. But it was so much easier to use, so much more put together for my way of thinking and working. Plus, the arrogance of Quark made me eager to leave them behind.
I kept both for a while, eventually ditching Quark at… I can’t remember what version anymore. 4? I was just happy to be rid of them.
I rarely use InDesign anymore. It’s almost 100% Web stuff now.
Trying to ditch Adobe too.
Oops. I mean I waited till version 1.5.
Quark priced itself right out of the market. Bad innovation didn’t help either. Plus their integration with photos and the web was crappy. I keep getting upgrade notices and I say “why would I pay that price to upgrade” Bye Bye market.
That being said Adobe could be on the same collision course….cloud and all!
Women still prefer printed materials in general. Magazines especially.
Nobody here used Pagestream? Ran rings around both. . . Had features both lacked and could do many things the press people were amazed at. Micro-sizing of everything was available, could handle any type of font, import any type of graphic, manipulate in the document, color separations, masking, multiple documents, sizes up to billboard. Developed and maintained by one guy, and multi platform to boot. Far better WYSIWYG, than Quark, Pagemaker, or even later InDesign. . . never had what I saw on the screen not be what came out of the printer. . . something that occurred too often with Pagemaker and Quark. It’s still being sold and supported.