CNET:
Turning over a new leaf at Quark. “It may well have been down to some pent-up anxiety over the level of customer service we were delivering, particularly in Europe, but we are fixing this. We may also have been perceived as expensive. I mean, people probably looked at Adobe’s products and probably felt that they had to buy PageMaker and Illustrator, so they pretty much got InDesign free anyway.”
Woof. They’re still not living in the real world. I, and everyone I know who utilized Quark, purposely and intentionally moved away because InDesign was simply a better product, no matter the price ... and could export PDFs without grief, which more and more printers were requesting. Quark killed Pagemaker because of the precision of placement, thousands of an inch (Pagemaker couldn’t). You could enter measurements directly by keypad in the interface. That single feature converted more people than any other in the early days. Printers loved the precision, hated the increasing quirkiness with every update. Quark got too big for its own boots, buying Strata 3D and making other wacky business decisions. I have a feeling the inertia of existing code and interface will remain daunting, and unless they make better strides with PDF creation, they will remain at the current marketshare.
Comments:
I could *swear* they bought Strata. Found a couple of threads that talk about the purchase before I posted this, but they could be misremembering also.
Immedia. That was the Authorware competitor they bought. It may be that Quark was just *discussing* buying Strata at that time, to round out their offerings. Everyone thought interactive CD’s were going to be big stuff back then.
Still, I stand by my statement. Where’s Immedia now? Quark Interactive Designer is a wholly different product, from my understanding.
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I think you’ve got your facts a little crossed. Quark never purchased Strata. You must be thinking of their purchase of that media authoring app - media factory or sum such.