Slashdot reports that the CEO of Quark, Inc., Kamar Aulakh, has resigned. Quark was largely responsible for a desktop publishing revolution with the release of QuarkXpress in 1987. Since then, QuarkXpress has dominated the desktop publishing market.
Quark also has a bad reputation for treating customers very poorly and imposing elaborate measures to prevent piracy of its product. Unfortunately, these measures negatively impact the product. I remember working on a project with a strict end-of-the-day deadline using QuarkXpress when, suddenly, the program prompted me to "re-validate" my copy of the program by clicking an internet link or calling customer service and getting a new validation code.
I was completely locked out of the program until I obtained this code.
Several times, I tried clicking the link, but it didn’t work. I broke down and called Quark’s notorious customer service line, where I was on hold for one-and-a-half hours. That’s a lot of lost productivity. As I’m sure many of you know, one-and-a-half hours seems like an eternity when you’re trying to meet a deadline. In my time with Quark I also encountered a number of other, smaller bugs in the program that, although not as debilitating as the glitch I’ve described, were no less annoying.
At a new workplace, I began using InDesign CS, Adobe’s answer to QuarkXpress. The difference is night and day. Granted, I know a lot of large designers are reluctant to move from Quark for some good reasons, but for the scope of page layout I do, InDesign is simply excellent. The price was also far below what Quark charged at the time. For under $1000, one could buy the Adobe Creative Suite (CS), which included InDesign, Photoshop (a bitmap image editor), and Illustrator (a vector image editor). In comparison, QuarkXpress by itself cost over $1200.
By treating its paying customers like criminals, developing a reputation for poor customer service, being slow to release a version of Xpress for Apple’s OS X operating system, charging ridiculous prices for version ugrades and releasing buggy software with poorly implemented new features, Quark went from being "the only game in town" to simply another competitor. If they don’t learn from their mistakes and correct them, and let the world know they have done so, Quark may find that Adobe has won the hearts and minds of designers. Where hearts and minds go, marketshare follows, which would leave Quark to die a slow death.
Good riddance.
0 Responses to “Quark, Inc. CEO Resigns”