Reinventing Quark: Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
Quark is changing. The company is reinvesting in marketing, customer service, technical support, and development. It has a new CEO. It has spent the last several years building a suite of multi-channel publishing products while looking over its shoulder at the competitive inroads that Adobe’s InDesign has made in what was a virtual QuarkXPress monopoly among professional publishers.
Quark’s fall from grace was largely of its own making – a combination of contradictory and some would say punitive policies, customer service and tech support horror stories, and a perceived arrogance that just rubbed people – particularly egalitarian Mac users – the wrong way. And last but not least, Quark absolutely dominated the professional publishing market, and we all know how well people like near monopolists (can you spell M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t?). No matter that behind the scenes Quark has listened to the marketplace, has seen that the future lies with workflow solutions and not just point shrink-wrapped products, and has quietly put together an impressive suite of multi-channel publishing system products that appear to deliver what the market has been asking for. There are just a lot of people out there who are pissed off at the company.
It’s no surprise, then, that the company has taken this as a wake up call and is moving into overdrive to rectify the problems of its recent past — and to get a jump start on inventing its future – with one of the most complete implementations of a multi-channel workflow publishing system that I’ve yet to see. (Editor’s note: The author consults with Quark, among other clients.)
QuarkAlliance: Reaching Out
As one example of this change – which appears to be genuine to me – Quark has been beefing up its engineering staff (up 33 percent to more than 1,000 engineers, with 80 percent being devoted to enterprise workflow products), technical support staff (up 60 percent) and customer service people (up 50 percent). Quark has also resurrected its QuarkAlliance program work with system integrators, trainers, and large end-user support organizations.
I’ll recount the conversation I had with the head of the QuarkAlliance program. Showing obvious enthusiasm for his job, he described how the program had “fallen in disarray and had been nearly cancelled” when he was given the task of revitalizing it. That was six months ago. Today the program is weeks away from being re-launched, and is currently being staffed up to support each class of customer — system integrator, output provider, ISVs — with its own program. Along with re-opening the lines of communication with this very important part of Quark’s sales and support channel, he will be looking for ways to initiate co-marketing and promotion programs with each of the partners. Quark will also be certifying end-users for the first time as part of this program as well.
The company has also sent a customer loyalty award to all registered customers for up to 50 percent off the total purchase prices of up to four additional licenses of any product — up to $250 per keynode. The loyalty award is applicable to both products and services — software, technical support, mobile licenses, ServicePlus membership, QuarkAlliance
membership — you name it. The company intends to bring back its user groups and is planning to organize a meeting similar to its Service Plus conference sometime this year. Activation and key validation won’t be going away, but the company is looking at ways to make it easier for people to manage their key codes within a workgroup and is willing to discuss any specific problem customers have in managing their QuarkXPress licenses.
In general, the new management team in place (which includes Kamar Aulakh, who was recently named president and CEO headquartered in Neuchatel, Switzerland; Jürgen Kurz, who is senior vice president of development located in Germany; and Debra Hansen, senior vice president of global sales and professional services, Susie Friedman, senior vice president of marketing, Charles Mueller, senior vice president of finance, and Cliff Kaplan, vice president of business development and OEM products – all out of Denver) appears to be Real Serious about reinventing Quark to be more customer-driven and to once again become a market leader.
QuarkXPress 7: XML Everywhere
Let’s first take a look at what Quark has planned for QuarkXPress, since it is the heart of Quark’s publishing systems solutions in one form or another. It’s also the product in Adobe’s cross hairs and that’s being attacked with renewed vigor with the recent release of its Creative Suite and InDesign 3.0.
Whereas Adobe is putting its stake in the ground of a PDF-based workflow (with, increasingly, an able assist from XML-based extensions such as JDF), Quark is betting on an XML future and consequently is engineering publishing workflows around XML and other Web standards. XML, which is short for “Extensible Markup Language,” is a flexible way to create standard information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web. Accordingly, Quark’s applications, from future versions of QuarkXPress on up, will be able to easily work with any data format that is XML savvy, including PDF. Print publishers who are trying to standardize on a PDF workflow may find this strategy suspect, but for the enterprise publisher – a category that eventually will include all publishers — an XML based multi-channel workflow makes a lot more sense.
I spoke with Jürgen Kurz who is working on QuarkXPress 7. He said that QuarkXPress 7 will extend the use of an XML Document Object Model (DOM) which will make it easy to get data in and out of QuarkXPress. The groundwork for the XML DOM is already in place in QuarkXPress 6, but it’s not as full-featured as Quark wants it to be, which is why Quark hasn’t made a big deal out of it until now. In QuarkXPress 6, the DOM interface is read-only, so applications can read QuarkXPress projects as XML, but not vice-versa. The QuarkXPress 7 DOM interface will be bi-directional.
QuarkXPress will continue to support its existing document object models for backward compatibility, but he believes the new “open” XML format will make it much easier to transform content as well as to interface with other systems, both Quark-supplied and third-party/legacy systems. Kurz believes that by doing so the cost of implementing page layout within a workflow will be driven down to nearly zero. “The DTP Revolution has happened,” he said, “upgrades are getting more and more incremental. The real money is in getting a customer to replace an existing workflow with a new one.” Quark is betting the company that the workflow is king, and that it will be XML-based.
To this end, QuarkXPress 7 is being designed to facilitate the product’s use in an XML-based multi-channel workflow. The company intends to make QuarkXPress play better in a PDF workflow, but Kurz believes that publishers will need to move beyond PDF-only workflows if they are to really take advantage of multi-channel publishing. He also said that Quark’s development team works in “two divisions working in concert, responsible for desktop and enterprise, so we don’t lose sight of the needs of either small or large customers. ”
“Print is moving more and more toward electronic publishing,” Kurz argued, “with PDF online, eBooks, Flash, eForms, etc. PDF is important but not the only format that people will need to use. The cost of doing [producing electronic content] still too high — the content creator is being increasingly asked to understand the workflow. That’s why we need to simplify the workflow by creating and supporting open standards for print and Web production workflows.” QuarkXPress 7 will make it much easier to synchronize content across multiple media, and reduce the burden on the content creator to be a master of all the technical details of the workflow. “QuarkXPress is an excellent template design tool,” Kurz concluded.
Feeling the heat from InDesign, Quark is striving to make up any feature gap that exists. Quark has felt compelled in recent months to equip its field staff with a sales presentation titled “Great Reasons to Use QuarkXPress,” touting both head-to-head benefits such as “Our Ease of Use” (tools, dialog boxes, palettes, and keyboard commands, many of which designers know by heart) to “Our Scalability” (extending beyond QuarkXPress to Quark Publishing System or Quark Content Manager for managing and repurposing content while expediting review processes, automatic XML syndication, Web site publishing, and so on.)
Regardless of your opinion of QuarkXPress’s competitive feature set head-to-head with Adobe In Design’s, the “Scalability” factor has let Quark pull away from Adobe in terms of solving the multi-channel publishing workflow puzzle. Adobe knows that it too has to get into the workflow solutions business, and has taken a baby step in that direction with Version Cue. But it has a long way to go to catch up with Quark. And Adobe knows it.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on April 6, 2004
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