Adobe wasn't just copying Quark's approach or feature set-it made a program that was both for production nuts who needed to work efficiently and creatives who were shown how digital typography and layout was meant to be. It didn’t hurt that InDesign was backed by the much larger Adobe, but it was the energy and excitement surrounding InDesign's features that created a buzz you never saw with Quark. But this market war turned out to be shorter than anyone would have predicted. With 95 percent market share for its competition, InDesign faced an obvious uphill battle. Simply put, this was a crucial nudge for many.
#Quarkxpress files mac
So when a revitalized Apple needed all the help it could get, telling Mac designers to switch to Windows was all the excuse these creatives needed to think that the grass was actually greener on the InDesign side. It would have been hard to find people more rabidly pro-Mac than people who were basically keeping pre-Jobs Apple afloat. Perhaps this seems like an overstatement, but desktop publishing was invented on the Mac. I've heard about Windows-based publishing environments, but I've never actually seen one in my 20+ years in design and publishing. However, what they were probably seeing was new users, not migration to Windows.
It was likely that Quark saw increasing growth in Windows sales as a sign that the Mac publishing market was dwindling. It's advice people apparently took-just not the way he meant it. 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." 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. OS X’s single promise of Unix-like stability turned its other short-term problems with snappiness into non-issues. But OS 9’s failings are well documented-a bad font in an ad could literally cost you a third of your day dealing with system crashes. Despite its inclusion of crucial publishing tech like AppleScript and ColorSync, it was definitely not production-ready. In 2001, Apple released OS X, which felt dog slow on existing hardware. Overwhelmingly, it all boils down to those personal stories of neglect that eventually eroded Quark's appeal and made a potentially painful transfer to another product the lesser of the evils. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as “totally insane.” HubrisĪnecdotal evidence is not the best way to objectively study anything, but ask anyone what caused them to leave XPress for InDesign. But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. We didn't immediately notice something that had as good a chance at taking over our honed workflow as did a reversion to Letraset. Most of us were too busy using XPress in hardened, well-established production routines under tight deadlines. To say that InDesign made a splash would be optimistic. That was the year that Adobe’s InDesign 1.0 hit the market. But when I left Vice in ’99, the privately held Quark Inc.’s best days were behind them. The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market at that time. When I eventually got summer jobs in DTP service bureaus and magazines, the dominance of QuarkXPress 3 was total. Sure, you might have heard the name Pagemaker by Aldus-later purchased by Adobe-but even with my little awareness of the publishing world outside our school walls, it was obvious that no one used it. Back then, when asked “what program do you learn for jobs in page layout and design," there was only one answer: QuarkXPress. I went to a high school for the arts-yes, it was just like Fame, so stop asking-and only got seriously into computers, Photoshop, and design in the early nineties. 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. 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. Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.
#Quarkxpress files professional
As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing.
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