Opinion: Since being steamrolled by the launch of Adobe's InDesign, Quark has worked to improve its tool and its reputation.Conventional wisdom in the technology sector has it that once a software application is in the enviable position of being a market standard, it is practically impossible to get users to move away from that tool, even if a competing product is significantly more powerful.
The hardest thing to change is work habits: We use best what we use most, and the majority of us do not enjoy changing tools. (Migrating whole workgroups from one technology platform to another is one of the more daunting challenges an IT manager can face.)
By that token, Quark Inc. had little to fear when Adobe Systems Inc. announced its decision to launch a page layout program almost five years ago to compete with QuarkXPress.
At that point, Quark's program was very much the Microsoft Office of professional publishing, and even a very powerful competitor would find it hard to change the minds of hundreds of thousands of users around the globe who literally knew QuarkXPress by heart, and mastered every little trick to turn around jobs efficiently.
In other words, Adobe InDesign was facing an uphill battle, and the first release, which came out in fall of 2000, hardly ruffled the surface of the professional publishing world: "Too slow, too immature" was the verdict of many professionals who were intrigued by a massive marketing campaign to launch the program. (Nevertheless, some publishing houses made the jump then and there: Conde Nast UK actually moved its magazine Glamour to InDesign in the first release and has by now converted a significant number of its publications over to Adobe's offering.)
Quark was at that time in a difficult and slightly contradictory situation: The users were extremely loyal to their tool of choice, but the company had worked up a rather bad reputation for being hard to deal with and providing less-then stellar customer support. Quark's image was bad enough to alienate many professional publishers.
In 1999, just prior to the commercial release of InDesign, Pfeiffer Consulting conducted an independent market survey about InDesign in magazine and newspaper publishing, and the interest Adobe's program had managed to generate in the market already at that time was significant. The market very clearly wanted an alternative, and the fact that it came from Adobe certainly helped.
Many companies we surveyed had decided already by that time that they would give InDesign a chance—although it was also clear that the program would need to mature a bit.
Things began to move when Adobe released Version 2.0 of InDesign: Despite some impressive technology (such as the highly sophisticated composition engine), the first release offered a feature set that was in many points comparable to QuarkXPress. InDesign 2.0, on the other hand, brought some groundbreaking features that professionals had wanted for a long time, such as transparency and sophisticated table support. And, last but not least, it ran not only on Mac OS 9, like QuarkXPress, but also on Mac OS X. (Quark took more a year longer to release a version compatible with Apple's new operating system.)
It is also quite clear that Quark for a long time underestimated the threat that the InDesign (and now Adobe Creative Suite) juggernaut presented for its market position. Quark should have started a complete rewrite of the aging code-base of QuarkXPress way back when Adobe acquired Aldus, eight or nine years ago. Rumors of a new page layout program were rampant in the industry then: K2 (the code-name for InDesign at the time) was going to set the publishing industry on fire, it seemed. Had Quark started development of a completely new version then, InDesign would not have had the head-start in terms of cutting-edge publishing technology it now enjoys.
Over the past three years, there has been a groundswell of publishers around the world who have turned to InDesign and have started converting their existing properties to the new tool. Prisma Presse, the leading magazine publisher in France, is more than halfway through the migration; National Magazine, in the UK, has almost completely converted its publications to InDesign; ACP, the biggest magazine publisher in Australia has also adopted InDesign on a large scale.
These are just three examples of an increasingly strong trend in magazine publishing. In the newspaper market as well, InDesign has become an increasingly strong player, since more and more editorial workflow systems embrace Adobe's page layout program as well as InCopy, the copy-fitting application based on the same core architecture as InDesign.
Which is not to say that everybody is busy moving to the new page layout environment: Reader's Digest has shown strong commitment to the QuarkXPress page layout environment, and so has National Geographic. Internationally, some groups and publications have decided that they do not really need the InDesign feature set: This is the case with German news-weekly "Die Zeit" and the Bonnier Magazine Group in Sweden.
This does not necessarily mean that these publishers have stopped watching Adobe's offering in the market. In other words, QuarkXPress 7 could very much be the pivotal product for Quark, through which the company will need to prove that it has indeed the capacity to keep up with Adobe in the technology race.
Under new management
Things are changing quickly at Quark, however. Kamar Aulakh, the new CEO who took over from Fred Ebrahimi about a year ago, has been a strong driving force behind a concerted effort to redefine Quark's company image. Quark now offers free tech support, as well as free upgrades to intermediary releases (unheard-of in the past). And the company is increasingly focusing on a development strategy which will differentiate it from Adobe.
The pace of development has increased as well: While Quark took many years to complete the 5.0 release of the page layout program, Version 6.0 came out much faster, followed recently by the 6.5 release. And while the company has not officially announced a ship date for QuarkXPress 7.0, it seems obvious that Quark is hard at work at bringing the new release out as soon as possible.
In the mid-term perspective, it will boil down to which identity Quark carves out for itself. Today, most people think of Quark mainly as the publisher of a page layout program. This might well change over time…
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
A correction was made in this story to a daytew reference regarding the release of InDesign.
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