Opinion: Many have written off Quark, but Publish.com executive editor Sean Gallagher thinks the company's focus on collaboration (among other things) in the upcoming QuarkXPress 7.0 will bring some customers back into the fold.Last week, I was instant messaging with a friend in the creative industry while waiting for a plane in Denver. I told her I had been in Denver to visit Quark.
"Isn't Quark over?" she asked.
I couldn't blame her for writing off Quark—lots of people have. And in the wake of last week's terse announcement from Quark that CEO Kamar Aulakh was no longer with the company, it's easy to understand why people might conclude that the company is "over."
After all, how can a relatively small, privately held software company that makes at best about $600 million in annual sales compete head-to-head with a publicly traded monster like Adobe with $1.4 billion in annual sales and a market capitalization of over $15 billion?
With Adobe about to swallow Macromedia and achieve near-monopoly status in the graphic and Web design tools space, it would seem Adobe is on the verge of cutting off Quark's air supply.
Beyond just the business arithmetic, there's other reason to wonder. The current release of Quark's flagship XPress product (version 6.5) has an interface that seems archaic in comparison with Adobe's InDesign CS2.
On the Mac, Quark lagged behind in moving natively to Mac OS X (although, in fairness, so did many of its customers), and the company is just now planning its move to Apple's Xcode development environment from Metrowerks' CodeWarrior.
Click here to read more about the release of XTend-Xport and XTend-Xport Light for QuarkXPress v6.x for Macintosh.
That means that while Quark's applications can take advantage of the user interface benefits of OS X Tiger, it will be some time before XPress and other Quark applications can take advantage of the G5 processor or prepare for Apple's move to Intel.
So where's the good news?
Well, for one thing, I can report that QuarkXPress 7, at least based on what I've seen so far, will help Quark either catch up or leapfrog Adobe's InDesign CS2 in a couple of departments—mostly through the exploitation of emerging standards in the design and printing world.
One of those departments is collaboration. Quark has always had an edge when projects go beyond a single desktop.
Quark has a flotilla of content management and collaboration products already on the market, as well as hooks into e-commerce store management, and personalized electronic document delivery.
Adobe's Version Cue and Bridge are adequate for basic collaboration (though to be honest, I'm still trying to figure out what benefit anybody gets from Bridge beyond access to Adobe's stock photo store).
To read more about buzz surrounding new features in QuarkXPress Version 7, click here.
But nothing in Adobe's current arsenal really measures up to Quark's enterprise offerings, like the Quark Publishing System and Quark Content Manager.
And even with the acquisition of Macromedia, it will be a long time before Adobe can stitch together its own content and asset management solutions to compete with QPS, Content Manager, and Quark's Commerce e-store management product.
But soon, Quark will unchain its collaboration capabilities from the enterprise.
QuarkXPress 7's Job Jackets, based on the Job Definition Format, is an XML format for passing information about design projects.
Job Jackets will allow designers, printing and prepress service providers, free-lancers and anyone else working on a design project to share stylesheets, output specifications, color definitions, and other key design information with each other peer-to-peer.
Then there's the support Quark has announced for database and personalized publishing.
Another emerging standard for print-on-demand, called Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML)—also based on XML—will allow Quark projects to be personalized for the target of each piece of output within the layout itself.
As Hewlett-Packard and other print-on-demand vendors start to provide more standardized support for PPML, XPress 7 might start to push personalized output beyond the realm of credit card bills and junk mail.
Then there's QXML, Quark's Document Object Model (DOM)-based interface for applications to pull XML-wrapped content out of XPress.
While XPress's Web-authoring capabilities have been somewhat limited, the QXML interface will help Quark and its partners hot-wire XPress into more high-powered Web content creation and management systems.
That's a key piece of Quark's plans for the future, as it looks beyond the realm of paper and ink toward "multi-channel" publishing, where the end product takes on multiple hard-copy and digital forms.
This isn't just Quark's show. Adobe is also, obviously, supporting JDF and PPML—in fact, Adobe was one of the original authors of JDF. So where is the support for these standards in Creative Suite 2?
That's a topic for next time.
Sean Gallagher is executuve editor of Ziff Davis Internet's vertical enterprise sites. He can be reached at sean_gallagher@ziffdavis.com.
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