On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 11:16 PM, Steve Sobek wrote: > On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 09:47 PM, Obi-Wan wrote: > >> Not really. From what I have read Quark is scrambling for their lives >> trying to get their product OS X compliant. Indesign is taking a lot >> of >> Quarks business away from them. I know whole firms that have made the >> switch from Quark to inDesign and they are thumbing their noses at the >> company. > > Is this surprising? If someone wants to defend them, go ahead, but I > know of very few software companies, regardless of how big the project > is, that are so slow between major releases, and I'm not just talking > about that one. Didn't we go like three or four years before getting > the most recent version?
Quark's slowness in releasing major and minor updates to QuarkXPress is the stuff of legends. Having dealt (extensively!) with Quark representatives as a purchasing agent for a major Ad agency, I can sum it up easily. They own (well, at the time I dealt with them, at least) a huge portion of the market. Genuinely huge. Most -serious- graphic artists don't just use Quark. They refuse to use anything else, sometimes violently. Quark knows this. Take the instance of QuarkXPress for OS X. Graphic artists and the like normally buy new computers every 12-18 months. Those in non-competitive fields may push it back to 18-24, but no one serious about publishing pushes it past that. So fundamentally tied to QuarkXPress are these users, that they're currently putting their purchases off of 48-54 months in some cases. They bought at about 12-18 months ahead of OS X 10.0, thinking a version of QuarkXPress for OS X wouldn't be far behind... and it wasn't there. They keep waiting. and waiting. and waiting. Some have given up and bought new hardware recently, but a great many are still holding out. Facing the prospect of OS 9-incompatible machines, no forthcoming ETA on QuarkXPress, and having already put off hardware purchases for much longer than they're accustomed to... they're (er, we're) starting to make decisions now. And Quark isn't going to like the decisions we're going to be making. Not at all. The sad part is that, if history w/ Quark is any indication, they probably won't even notice until they're putting up a foreclosure sign. -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
