In 1989, QuarkXPress 2.1.2 surpassed Aldus PageMaker 3 in the hearts, minds, and studios of most page-layout professionals. That began a 15-year essential monopoly of the professional page-layout industry by Quark and its flagship application, QuarkXPress.
During those years, Quark’s upgrades, especially versions 5 and 6, were not universally adopted by the industry, and Quark had also developed a reputation of arrogance and indifference to the professionals who bought its products. Adding to users’ frustration was the fact that although Apple released Mac OS X in 2001, Quark took two more years to release QuarkXPress 6, the first version to run natively on Mac OS X.
In that same year, 2003, Adobe shipped InDesign CS, the first true competitor to QuarkXPress. Adobe intended for InDesign to be a huge leap ahead of QuarkXPress, and it was. Unfortunately for the millions of QuarkXPress users using Mac OS X, QuarkXPress 6 seemed like not much more than QuarkXPress 5 that had been upgraded to run on Mac OS X. Version 6 did include several innovative new features, and version 6.5 added many more, but mostly Quark was perceived as unsuccessfully trying to catch up to InDesign.
It’s now apparent to me that much of what Quark was actually doing in their years-long rewrite of QuarkXPress 6 was setting up some revolutionary ground-level technologies that they would unleash in subsequent releases.
This is a sidebar to the article “QuarkXPress 7: Public Beta Explored”
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on January 26, 2006
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