
How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing - DanBC
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-darling/
======
jaysonelliot
It all boiled down to one thing for me as a print designer at the time: OS X.

Quark simply failed to release a version for the new OS, and like the article
says, it treated Mac users with disdain when we asked for it. Anyone who
worked in print during the '90s and Aughts knows that Windows was disliked by
designers for its poor handling of type and PostScript. We weren't about to
switch our entire computing platforms, thousands or even tens of thousands of
dollars worth of equipment, just so we could use a layout program from a
company that seemed to want us gone.

As far as the print community was concerned, Quark had stopped releasing
software. We didn't "switch" so much as we were forced to look elsewhere when
the product disappeared.

It was actually a bit strange turning to Adobe at first, because they had
picked up Aldus, and Pagemaker with it, and it didn't have the best
reputation. Discovering that InDesign was actually superior to Quark was just
the cherry on top. Think of it like being dumped by someone you really loved,
only to find out there was a much cuter, smarter, funnier person who'd been
crushing on you the whole time, just waiting for you to see that they were
there. Quark became the ex, and InDesign got the ring.

~~~
smacktoward
Yeah, Quark made a lot of mistakes, but I agree that this was the Big One.
Quark's audience were Mac users, Mac users were moving to OS X, Quark refused
to go with them. Even at the time it was an utterly baffling decision; it
hasn't gotten any easier to understand with time.

I would love to read an article that interviews Quark insiders about why they
made that choice, what the internal factors were that drove them in that
direction. Seeing as how it was basically corporate suicide and all.

~~~
danielweber
What portion of their users were Mac users?

I vaguely recall Quark being in the category of things where the software cost
more than the hardware. At some level it can make sense to tell the user to
switch their hardware and OS (since it's the smaller portion of the cost), but
you still need the customers to listen.

~~~
whyenot
It's easy to forget how expensive computers were in this time period. A new
high end mac (or PC) could easily set you back $10,000 or more. A Mac IIfx was
$8,970-10,970, monitor not included.

~~~
ido
You're talking 10-15 years earlier than the time at hand (early 2000s). By
then computers were already pretty cheap.

------
tim333
The article mentions Quark lost because it became rubbish but does not give
the more interesting reason as to why that happened, basically that "The
original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire
development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to
India"

[http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=s...](http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=86852)

~~~
ttcbj
For what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS
timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. He was
very knowledgable about Quark's code.

During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able
to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many
MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify
that it would never happen.

There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the
InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty
unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before
InDesign became dominant.

I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers
during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a
classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for
slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer
technologies and for faster machines.

InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop
application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared
to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end,
faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as
optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to
innovate faster.

I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS
transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and
require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the
architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more
innovation.

I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.

~~~
001sky
As a side note, I always wondered if the Creative Suite product offering
(which bundled ID with photoshop) was just hype or also really got people
(especially students) to just forget about Quark. That seemed to happen around
the same time, give or take some years of overlapp.

~~~
biot
The article makes that point explicitly:

    
    
      And things got even worse for Quark when, in 2003, you
      could get InDesign as part of the newly introduced
      Creative Suite Bundle, which as a publisher or graphic
      designer, you would have probably bought anyway for
      Photoshop and Illustrator. You were basically getting
      InDesign for free—it was a Trojan horse in the bundle box,
      and I think it really sealed the deal for people on the
      fence about the switch.

------
mbesto
Reminds me of the story about Excel and Lotus notes:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html)

I love this:

 _There 's nothing wrong with being in a market that has established
competition. In fact, even if your product is radically new, like eBay, you
probably have competition: garage sales! Don't stress too much. If your
product is better in some way, you actually have a pretty good chance of
getting people to switch. But you have to think strategically about it, and
thinking strategically means thinking one step beyond the obvious.

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate
barriers. Imagine that it's 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market
share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask
yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming
Excel customers tomorrow?_

------
MBCook
On episode 54 of Accidental Tech Podcast [1], they mentioned a recent flair-up
about the screen writing software Final Draft.

It seems the CEO went on a podcast about script writing called ScriptNotes two
times [2] and it sounds like he was caught totally flat by listener feedback
about how far behind his product was. Film director Kent Tessman wrote up a
post [3] about how foreseeable much of this was and just how bad the situation
is.

It reminded me quite a bit of this article. An old & dominate piece of
software that is built on old technologies and has obvious deficiencies that
doesn't seem to be progressing and seems ripe for disruption.

1\. [http://atp.fm/episodes/54-goto-fail](http://atp.fm/episodes/54-goto-fail)

2a . [http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-
final-...](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft)

2b. [http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-
space](http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space)

3\. [http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-
scriptnotes/](http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/)

~~~
bane
Fascinating. There's been lots of recent discussion about problems with the
Wii U launch by Nintendo. One of the interesting things to come out of it:

Pre-launch American third party companies kept asking Nintendo about how the
networking system would work, referencing XBOX Live and Sony's offerings as
examples. Would it be on-par, or similar in features, or totally different?

Nintendo responded by asking the third party developers to please stop
referencing the other company's on-line systems because nobody at Nintendo had
any experience with them.

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-secret-
developers-wii-u-the-inside-story)

"This was surprising to hear, as we would have thought that they had plenty of
time to work on these features as it had been announced months before, so we
probed a little deeper and asked how certain scenarios might work with the Mii
friends and networking, all the time referencing how Xbox Live and PSN achieve
the same thing. At some point in this conversation we were informed that it
was no good referencing Live and PSN as nobody in their development teams used
those systems (!) so could we provide more detailed explanations for them? My
only thought after this call was that they were struggling - badly - with the
networking side as it was far more complicated than they anticipated. They
were trying to play catch-up with the rival systems, but without the years of
experience to back it up."

~~~
MBCook
I remember reading that. I love Nintendo, but not only was that line
incredibly sad, but it spoke _volumes_ about my experience with Nintendo's
software in recent years (outside single player games). It rang too true.

------
nobleach
As a Graphic Design major at the end of the 90's, I had to learn to eat, sleep
and breathe Quark. Dealing with the company was HELL on a student. For context
sake, this was right around the time that Apple released their new iMac with
NO ADB ports. (USB only) Quark used a hardware dongle even for their
educational version (which cost over a thousand dollars if I remember
correctly) The company was extremely obtuse when it came to solutions. They
suggested I buy an ADB to USB adapter. It flaked out constantly. I tried a few
different models. I turned to Quark for help. Almost every conversation with
support seemed to be "you don't like it? try formatting your text in Microsoft
Publisher". All I was asking was to assist me in using their software - which
I had paid for. At that time, they OWNED the market, so anyone that they
helped was almost guaranteed to be a future customer. Adobe on the other hand
had educational versions of Illustrator and Photoshop for 99 bucks a piece. I
graduated when InDesign 1.0 had just come out. No one took it seriously at
that point as it was brand new. But Quark's "we don't care, we don't have to"
attitude is definitely part of what unseated them.

------
err4nt
I have used both inDesign and Quark in a professional print-design setting.

Another thing that the author left out here was the to be a power-user of
nearly _any_ software package requires you to learn keyboard shortcuts.

I can remember day 1 I made up a big list of all Quark shortcuts, printed &
laminated it and used that thing all day every day. This was a major hurdle to
new Quarks users - they're too slow until they memorize the shortcuts.

inDesign was smart about this, not only could you _change_ your user
shortcuts, but they were malleable enough you could even make the same as
Quark's shortcuts if you so desired. You had the freedom to mold the software
to your way of working.

Ultimately it became very very trivial for Quark users to switch _to_
inDesign, but going from inDesign _to_ Quark was like a step back in time.

~~~
mung
I worked at a prepress & design company (in prepress) that used Quark. I had
time to kill every now and then so decided to start reading and working
through the InDesign 2 instruction manual (actual printed manual). I'd learn
something and small and think "holy shit, this might actually be a wonderful
application". It gave those tear to eye of joy type of moments constantly
(something I don't get much with just about anything anymore). So I worked on
getting the designers to switch. They were skeptical and at first mildly
unwilling because it would interrupt their workflow but were eventually forced
to by our studio manager. Their attitudes changed very quickly despite the
pains of learning a new app and dropping something that they were masters of.
Anyway, while I had a rep for being quite technical and quick to learn stuff,
they all had quite a few years experience more than me and were faster with
the keyboard (I was no slouch). Switching to InDesign leveled the playing
field dramatically for me, it was at that company where I think I went from
juniorish/intermediate to senior level mac op within about a year or less. I
decided to learn the native shortcuts because it was obvious that this was the
app of the future. The designers used the Quark shortcuts but probably learned
the native ones eventually. Well, one hopes anyway. Doing web application
development now of course, can't stand prepress which has quite a low glass
ceiling and is quite depressing really.

------
billyhoffman
A product with 95% market share needs engineering a lot less than it needs
sales/finance. As engineers, we see this as "business guys screwing it all
up." But these companies are acting rationally give the environment they are
in.

Why the focus on sales? Because at that size of a market share the features of
the product matter less. Adding feature X is very unlikely to get you more
share. Additionally, the product has so much inertia that it can become bad,
and you won't tank over night.

The only way a company in that market can continue to grow revenue and profits
is to reduce costs and increase sales. Hence the focus on sales guys who can
talk the talk, bundle software and discount, and do everything to eck out more
share. Meanwhile finance guys come in and look to see what they can trim, and
often that's engineering.

Now we can argue about the net effects that the enormous pressure to keep
growing can cause. Or about how the stock market and C-level executive comp
structure has promoted short term thinking over long term strategy (Just look
at Michael Dell. He had to literally take his company out of the public
markets to do the long term work that needed to be done to save Dell). These
companies are acting rationally give the environment they are in. The
environment is just screwed up.

I don't fault Quark for being stupid. Instead I simple recognize that they
were not exceptional enough to free themselves from this cycle. Very few do.

~~~
ForHackernews
> The only way a company in that market can continue to grow revenue and
> profits is to reduce costs and increase sales. Hence the focus on sales guys
> who can talk the talk, bundle software and discount, and do everything to
> eck out more share. Meanwhile finance guys come in and look to see what they
> can trim, and often that's engineering.

Honest question from a non-businessperson: Why do you have to keep _growing_
revenue and profits? Like, at some point, if you're making fucktons of money,
can't you just focus on guaranteeing you continue making fucktons of money?
Isn't it inherently unsustainable to have to be making even larger fucktons?

If I'm traveling someplace, I accelerate until I'm going as fast as I want to
be going, and then I don't have to keep accelerating anymore more.

~~~
dreamfactory2
At that size you need to innovate to even stand still as the environment is
changing around you, and this flux only gets magnified by your market share.

------
danso
Interesting new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss comment on the OP:

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/01/quarkx...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/01/quarkxpress-the-demise-of-a-design-desk-
darling/?comments=1&post=26031181#comment-26031181)

> _I remember the exact moment that Quark p_ ssed me off so badly that it
> forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered
> another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of
> "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return
> the unopened PC version for a Mac version but they would do nothing. No
> transfer, no refund, I was S.O.L. of $800. That pushed me over the edge to
> try Indesign, and I never looked back. I now owe Quark thanks, because as a
> printer and early adopter of Indesign, I personally helped dozens of my
> designer customers discover Indesign and switch from Quark. Adobe was a true
> partner company and we all made great businesses together….*

> _…. until Adobe Creative Cloud. It 's dejaVu all over again, where Quark and
> now Adobe customers feedback can be ignored. Adobe with CC has succeeded in
> p_ssing off former advocates so badly that it's a distasteful just to say
> Adobe. In one swoop they destroyed tens of thousands of users paid value in
> anyone's full paid CS6. (except for a slight discount for first year towards
> forever payments). This CC Adobe bundle of 20+ crap apps to create value,
> much like Corel tried to do unsuccessfully a decade earlier, is an insult.*

\---

I'm still using my legal copy of CS5, though I recently upgraded from
Lightroom 4 to Lightroom 5. There was some kind of deal to use the Creative
Cloud but I ignored it because even though I was only upgrading because LR4
doesn't yet support my new camera, the $99 upgrade is a pittance compared to
the time LR saves me in photo editing. Second to Sublime Text, Lightroom is my
favorite "work" purchase I've made as an individual customer.

So, what do people think of the Cloud? I didn't really read the terms, just
that it sounded cheaper, in the way that "Just 30 monthly installments of
$10!" sounds cheaper on certain TV advertisements.

~~~
neonkiwi
I needed Premiere for a short project, so the Creative Cloud business model
was great for me. I was prepared to spend a couple of bucks to use this
software for a month, but they actually give you an automatic first month
free.

I don't normally do any video editing, so this saved me a lot of money. But I
certainly wouldn't buy my PCB layout software this way; I use it all the time
and it makes a lot more sense for me to own a license with the ability to
upgrade when a new version comes out rather than pay in perpetuity.

It seems to me that Adobe's business model here is amazing for people _outside
of their target market._ A casual user who rarely needs their tools will love
this, but their core user base is losing out. That's very short-sighted on
their part.

------
carterparks
I witnessed this turnover first hand when I was hired on as a customer service
representative at the launch of QuarkXPress 5. This was a major release given
that they hadn't released a major version for 5 years! Hilariously enough, we
were trained to tout OS X support... via Rosetta. Native support didn't come
until QXP6.

While I do think the major reason why Quark failed was due to a lack of a
native OSX app, I think there's another major reason... Creative Suite.

The vast majority of desktop publishing users required Photoshop and the
pricing difference between Photoshop and Creative Suite was much less than
adding (or even upgrading) QuarkXPress. There's also the integration between
CS apps that Quark couldn't compete with.

On a sidenote, people have mentioned how Quark was sold to Fred Ebrahimi and
he outsourced the vast majority of the engineering staff to India, but did you
know he also created Quark City?
[http://www.quarkcity.com/](http://www.quarkcity.com/)

------
bane
I think this is a good example of what lots of people call the "MBA business
model". It's a bit unfair to the MBA, but the idea is this:

1\. End up in control of a thriving business. Doesn't matter how, flashy
credentials and a nice suit, mixed with lots of buzz words and business speak
usually work.

2\. Fire everybody responsible for driving the product forward, frame this as
"increasing profitability" or "cutting costs" or similar.

3\. Increase sales staff and squeeze as much blood from this stone as
possible.

4\. When the market for your product inevitably shrinks because you've made
your product irrelevant or because of competition or other reasons, blame
shifting market winds for making your product irrelevant.

5\. Sell the product or company off to somebody else, collect cash out your
stock, rinse and repeat...or spend some time on your yacht.

An anecdote also related to the article. I grew up in family business...not
very successful family business, but nevertheless. One of the businesses my
family ran for a number of years was a small (very small) print house. Most
months it didn't generate enough to pay my parent's paycheck, but they stuck
with it till retirement.

One of the interesting things I had a chance to see was the invention and
growth of the electronic desktop publishing industry. At the start layout was
a _very_ long process of getting blocks of text in a chosen font and size
printed on small dedicated machines not too far removed from what Gutenberg
would recognize. Then a specialist would, on a light table, manually cut the
text to size, and _glue_ the pieces of the layout to a master sheet. When all
the artwork was finally in place, they'd go and produce a photographic
negative of the final page, and then using something like lithography burn the
image to a metal sheet which was then used on a press to produce the final
page. As you can guess this took forever, but one of the most laborious parts
was getting the original little blocks of text made up.

Enter the computer age and a small business like my parents could drop $20k
for a pre-press dedicated layout system. I don't remember too many details of
it, but it looked basically like your typical early 80s green screen computer.
Everything was typed up by a specialist in some kind of meta-LaTeX-like
language. There was a secondary very high res and large for the time black and
white graphics preview monitor you could render the page on to get a look and
proof (if you had enough memory). Then you could "print" the result to a
photoprinter that worked quite a bit like a mini-darkroom. You had to keep
various reservoirs stocked with the appropriate photographic chemicals, but
the output was state of the art of the time. The rest of the process was
virtually identical to the above -- even then it cut turnaround time on a job
in-half. I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never
seen anything else like it. On occasion, when it broke down, a specialist
would be called in to come repair it.

Over time, and as small printing business printing got more complex and this
system aged, they replaced it a couple of times until eventually they hired a
guy who also had his own smaller printing business on the side. They bought
him out and he brought in-house a very early full-pre press desktop publishing
system with him. Which was Windows 2.0 and a very old version of Aldus
PageMaker, I think it was 3.something and a very expensive laser printer. They
pretty much stuck with this setup until they sold the company many years
later. Basically what this bought was that it essentially removed all the
manual gluing and carefully measured layout such that, once a page was setup,
you printed it off, took it to the dark room, made your negative and then the
plate and the printing was off. It saved _days_ of work.

Again, as the business grew more complex, the demand for color and complex
layouts increased they started to need to do full color proofs. In printing,
one of the principle problems is that, once a design gets through all of the
darkroom, lithograph, ink color matching, screens etc. it rarely looks much
like the original design. This magnifies when you start working with 2 colors,
then gets exponentially more complicated up to 4 (CMYK). So the need for rapid
proofs of what the design would _probably_ look like became more and more
important -- even then the proof only had a passing resemblance to the final
product. Unfortunately, the equipment that could produce these proofs was
prohibitively expensive. So my parent's graphics guy would outsource his
designs to a graphics bureau to make a proof. I think a few pages might take a
day or two to turn around and cost a couple hundred dollars.

I used to deliver the disks over to the bureau and remember the first time I
walked in. A gleaming open room, packed full of Macintoshes running
QuarkXPress and PageMaker, and some very expensive printer looking devices all
along a back wall. I'd give them the disk and the job order and inevitably get
a groan when I pointed out that it was a PC formatted disk (this was back in
the days that this mattered). "Oh, it's you guys, when are you ever going to
get a Mac and get Quark? It'll make this much easier." They'd wheel out, on a
movable desk, an old PC, blow the dust off and fire it up and make sure the
disk was readable. "Okay, we'll _sigh_ call you when it's done."

Various incompatibilities with some of their proof making equipment and their
PC caused lots of time and cost overruns, but it had to be done. I'm pretty
sure, in the local market they worked in, they may have been the only PC
graphics shop around. It sucked interfacing with the rest of the market, but
at the same time, _everybody_ who brought in their own artwork did that work
on a PC, not a Mac. All the churches and parents getting wedding invitations,
all the small businesses getting tri-fold fliers, _all_ of them. And they got
lots of business because other companies refused to deal with their homespun
PC formatted artwork.

I don't have a point, just thought I'd add a little first hand history.

~~~
goatforce5
> I wish I could remember the name of the machine, because I've never seen
> anything else like it

Sounds like a phototypesetter:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting)

(I'm probably going to get some terminology wrong here, but...) My mum worked
at a regional daily newspaper. They had 2 or 3 phototypesetters in the corner
of their computer room. Each one was about the size of 3 full height racks.
They'd print on to photographic paper and were designed to be automatically
fed in to a machine (about 1.5 full height racks high) from the same
manufacturer that would develop the paper, ready for a Compositor (ie, a surly
unionized employee) to cover it with hot wax, slice it with a scalpel and
physically lay it out on the page. If the printer crashed, it would have to be
rebooted with a series of switches to bootstrap it far enough that it could
load it's bootloader (?) from paper tape.

Where she worked decided to use a different manufacturer for the printer and
the developer such that it wouldn't automatically feed from one to the other.
So the printer dumped it's outputs in to boxes mounted on the wall of a
darkroom and would wait for someone to go in and manually feed it in to the
developer.

It was glorious.

If anyone ever gets the chance to go on an open-day or tour of the noisy end
of a newspaper or large print shop, i'd totally recommend it.

~~~
larrys
"Sounds like a phototypesetter:"

Wanted to add that to this day I can still remember the sound of the stepper
motors spinning and manipulating the plastic font disks. A really cool sound.
(Similar in a way to modem negotiation but lasting much longer obviously).

On those machines for anyone not familiar you actually had to write code (mark
point, return point) in order to draw a simple box. Then more code for the
actual type. Everything was placed by coordinates.

So when (even) mac paint was released and you could draw a box and put type
inside of it the potential seemed quite obviously. It also added greatly to
creativity because a designer could work in real time coming up with a design.

~~~
davebindy
Even more fun was the Compugraphic Junior. It didn't use disks, but film
strips with the font. Then your had to switch out some gears to change the
font size.

Seemed pretty futuristic at the time though.

------
interstitial
Quark's postmortem comes up a lot, having been in the publishing trenches I
see it differently: Quark bet heavily on interactive CD-ROMS as the future,
not the internet. They developed cross-compilation from print to interactive
CD-ROMs. In a betamax vs. VHS war, the interactivity of CD-ROMs lost to the
horrible and graphically disastrous web 0.9beta. Somehow this is forgotten
when gurus want to classify every business story according to pet-theories of
success and failure. Could you be betting on the wrong future?

~~~
pwthornton
Having been around when Quark started to fall behind and then switching to
InDesign myself, I don't agree with you. QuarkXPress was crap, and Quark had
no interest in modernizing their software. It took forever just to get native
OS X support, and the software lacked a lot of InDesign's print publishing
features. Desktop publishing has always been a Mac-centric affair, and
ignoring Mac users was a pretty poor decision.

Quark tried to milk its customers dry. It did and then they moved on. They
never diversified their company, and the one product they made was becoming
despised.

Final Draft is a good modern-day version of QuarkXPress.

~~~
interstitial
A quark user could smoke an InDesign user, mintues vs hours. High pressure,
high speed design is still not matched by InDesign today. But there is very
little high speed design left. Of course, InDesign is wonderful now.

------
davidw
This reads a bit like something from

[http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Stupidity-Marketing-
Disaster...](http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Stupidity-Marketing-
Disasters/dp/1590597214?tag=dedasys-20)

albeit with more focus on the features and less on what led Quark to screw up.

------
protomyth
I would emphasize the utter hatred QuarkXPress had for its customers[1], and
given Adobe's track record, they were some of the worst in the industry.

1) dongle issues

------
unwind
It was interesting that the article used the word bo{2}b in the section about
regular expressions.

I'm not particularly bothered by it, although I recognize that it's not
neutral with everybody and thus best avoided. I'm just fascinated since it
it's very rare in mainstream publications, especially from the US.

~~~
vvvVVVvvv
Well it's ArsTechnica, not Disney Channel.

A bit immature but nothing really offensive.

------
aaronbrethorst
"listen to your users and respect them"

yep.

