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Quark CEO on customer service
Quark continues to fight back in its battle for software survival in the newspaper business.
The Denver Post scores a rare interview with new Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh.
"We have been very successful," Aulakh says in the linked article. "Sometimes when you are successful, you lose touch with the customer."
Anvil falls.
More: "The last couple of years, the industry has been switching in droves to InDesign," said Pariah Burke, a desktop publishing consultant based in Portland, Ore. "If Quark doesn't have a strong showing with the next release of their software, there will be trouble."
The Post piece quotes the latest version of Quark at $945 per seat and puts Adobe's package of InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop at $995.
Quark is at 170 jobs at its headquarters, down from 440 in 2002.
March 3, 2005 | Permalink
Comments
For the longest time I had a love/hate relationship with QuarkXPress, as I'm sure many other designers did. I knew Quark (the application) very very well and reveled in that. But over time I noticed a complete lack of innovation from Quark (the company). What was it, Quark 5.0 that had the HTML features built into it? WTF was that all about? Nobody really needed that, that's what Dreamweaver was for.
I was hesitant to really get into InDesign because a part of me wanted to be able to dive right in from the get-go, but that learning curve always drove me right back to Quark, it was my comfort zone.
Then recently I was working on-site as a freelancer and the job used Quark at first but then needed to have documents converted to InDesign. Let's say I really cut me teeth on this. I was already a little familiar with InDesign but after the first week I was cranking out documents at production level speed, and it felt damn good.
I knew that I would love InDesign once I could get into it. Turns out that learning curve wasn't anywhere near as steep as I thought it would be. I never want to go back to Quark, they got lazy in their success and now Adobe is spanking them hard just like they deserve.
The other day I got a little promo piece in the mail from Quark. It talks about how the new release of Quark with all it's new features is going to make Adobe cry. Then they list about 4 or 5 of the features... all of which InDesign already has in it's own arsenal. You know what this looks like? All these years Quark could have implimented unlimited Undos but chose not to. Now that they are about to be run out of town they decide they should go ahead and do it now. And then they try to brag about it? That looks really really bad Quark, shame on you.
Sorry for the long story, but I wanted to share my story so you knew where my real reply was coming from:
Great post, glad to see Quark is getting what it deserves although it brings me no joy to see hundreds of people lose their jobs because the executives had their collective heads where the sun doesn't shine. Unfortunately because their heads were there for so long that even now when they pull their heads out, they still only see crap as a vision.
Posted by: Michael Holdren | Mar 9, 2005 10:00:04 PM
They were busying counting their profits and failed to innovate or keep up with the consumer.
Sound familiar?
Posted by: SportsDesigner | Mar 10, 2005 2:27:54 AM
I'm going to assume you're refering to Microsoft, in which I whole-heartedly agree. Quark was the Microsoft of the design industry.
Posted by: Michael Holdren | Mar 11, 2005 1:11:30 PM
I assumed you were talking about newspapers...
Posted by: nicole | Mar 11, 2005 1:19:20 PM
