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I remember that so well! Adobe was brilliant: They gave away InDesign for next to nothing -- made it THE upgrade path to their PageMaker users and owned the market. My understanding was that Quark was a private company so they never had the cash to go after Adobe, also unlike Adobe they were a one product company (and their multimedia offering was terrible).



Believe it or not, Quark initiated a takeover attempt of Adobe around 1998 or so. Adobe had been hurting pretty badly at the time, and their stock was so low that Quark thought that they might be able to buy them and take them private.

I was there...they herded everyone down to an all-hands meeting, and announced that they had made an unsolicited offer to buy Adobe. The room went nuts, but I remember a few of the more senior developers grumbling that it was insane (which it was. Adobe had a poison pill, and even if it hadn't, the stock leapt as soon as the news of the offer hit the wire. Quark never had a chance.)

Three years later, of course, Fred Ebrahimi fired most of the development staff, and the rest is history.


Interesting story.

For anyone else wondering what a "poison pill" is, in this context:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/poisonpill.asp




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