Creative Analysis: The Impact of QuarkXPress 6

Pam Pfiffner

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The announcement that QuarkXPress 6 ships this week opens a new chapter in what has become an epic saga pitting two products, two companies, and two cultures against each other for the hearts and minds (and CPUs) of designers everywhere. If it were a summer blockbuster movie, the battle between QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign would carry overtones of “The Lord of the Rings” (the war of good against evil), ” The Matrix” (the nature of reality), “The Italian Job” (the heist of customers), and even “A Mighty Wind” (the hot air of marketing). Then of course, you’d have to throw in “Finding Nemo” for the genius of Steve Jobs in crafting a compelling tale out of nothing but pixels and persuasion.

But this is not a movie. This is work. Besides, I couldn’t possibly cast the roles of Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

The release of QuarkXPress 6 is an important event, not just for the extra fuel it adds to the fiery debate over QuarkXPress vs. InDesign. Although that competition fascinates, there’s more to QuarkXPress than that. A review of QuarkXPress 6 is in our story queue at creativepro.com. The relative merits of the two programs I leave for another day. Stay tuned.

But as I’ve spent a lot of time talking to the folks at Quark (for the record, I talk a lot to Adobe, too), here are some thoughts I have about Quark the company and QuarkXPress the product.

Quark and Apple
Last week at an invitation-only briefing for QuarkXPress 6 at Apple Computer’s campus in Cupertino, the importance of the world’s leading page-layout application being available as an OS X-native application was underscored by Jobs himself. Taking the stage first, Jobs said that while 6,000 applications were available for OS X, one very important one was not, and now with Quark’s adoption of the platform, the OS X migration was complete.

Then came the Kodak moment — or more appropriately, the Hallmark moment, because representatives from Hallmark were in the audience as customers of both Quark and Apple: When Ebrahimi came on stage, he embraced Jobs.

I had heard the night before that they also hugged during a dry run of the presentation, but whether scripted or spontaneous, it was a surprisingly touching act. Apple and Quark have been at odds for years. To call it a love-hate relationship doesn’t begin to describe it. Jobs himself said that there were “great times’ and “rocky times. As I wrote in the June 2003 issue of Macworld magazine as a sidebar to this David Blatner preview of QuarkXPress 6: “Recent anti-Apple outbursts by Quark’s voluble CEO Fred Ebrahimi may have actually paved the way for better relations. At one November meeting of Quark customers during which Quark showed off server technologies, attendees said that Ebrahimi made disparaging comments about the size of the Mac market, which led observers to question Quark’s allegiance to Apple and its customer base.”

Clearly, that’s all behind them — for now. Jobs, Ebrahmini, and Juergen Kurz, Quark vice president of product management, all said that for the past 18 months, the relationship between the two companies has been the best it’s ever been. Certainly, Apple’s public display of affection for Quark — not only the literal embrace but also its fiscal support by putting on last week’s press junket — supports that conclusion. Quark returned the favor by demonstrating Quark Digital Document Server (QuarkDDS), the company’s Web-enabled content management system, running on an Apple XServe machine. This was also significant as Quark had publicly rejected XServe in the past, according to reports. Alas, the demo crashed, indicating to me that it was a latecomer to the love-fest.

The bottom line, of course, is that Apple needs QuarkXPress on OS X so that service bureaus, printers, and publishers who use QuarkXPress on the Mac will finally jettison OS 9 in favor of OS X. Many of those shops — a number of whom still run QuarkXPress 3.x or 4.x — have been able to use older G3 or even PowerPC Macs. OS X does not run effectively on those older machines. Anyone who wants to run QuarkXPress 6 will have to upgrade to a G4 processor. Period.

What was especially striking about the event was the humility displayed by both Jobs and Ebrahimi, both of whom are known for their larger-than-life personalities. Both men issued apologies to their users. Jobs said that while the transition to a new operating system was necessary, he was sorry it had been so difficult. And Ebrahimi admitted that Quark was reluctant to embrace OS X at first, “but now that we are inside, it’s a great operating system.” He added: “We should have done this earlier. I apologize for being late.”

I thought heard the sound of hell freezing over but I couldn’t be sure due to the noise of the flapping of wings on the pigs flying overhead. For the record, QuarkXPress 6 will run on Macintosh OS 10.2.6 (or later), Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Of course there was no mention of Windows at this Apple-sponsored event.

QuarkXPress and InDesign
I can’t tell you how many times in the past few months I’ve been asked for my advice on the topic of QuarkXPress or InDesign. My usual reply: “What program do you use now? Are you happy with it? If so, stick with it. If not, change.”

Ok, that ‘s a bit simplistic, but at the heart of the matter, that’s what will drive your decision. I’m a big believer in the adage, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I admit that thinking is not conducive to great advances in philosophical or technical development, but in an industry that relies heavily on centuries-old traditions, that model might hold sway. It’s only been in the past 10 years that printers have fully adopted digital tools, and QuarkXPress has been at the core of that transformation. Changing to new software just when it’s finally all working together isn’t a step to be undertaken lightly. It requires thousands, if not millions, of dollars in product purchasing, employee training, and systems testing. If your company is strapped financially — and who isn’t — switching to another application has to be considered carefully.

The argument can be made that QuarkXPress on OS X is such a fundamental change that for users of QuarkXPress 3.x or 4.x, upgrading to version 6 is equivalent to changing applications. I don’t disagree with that. Many features have been added ‘twixt 4.1 and 6. But to many old Quark hands, XPress 6 will feel familiar — the biggest adjustment will be to OS X.

At the Apple event, Quark trotted out three customers to give testimonials about what QuarkXPress 6 means to them. All said they had been holding back on OS X because of QuarkXPress, and all said that they now plan to switch to OS X and to upgrade to QuarkXPress 6. What was remarkable to me is that these three customers — Quebecor, currently the world’s largest printing company; Hallmark, the greeting card company; and The Art Institutes, the art-education franchise — represent 8,700 seats of QuarkXPress on the Mac. That’s a lot of upgrades.

We often forget in the din of Adobe marketing and insider opinion that QuarkXPress is very well established, thank you. On the surface, InDesign seems to have all the PR and marketing momentum. That’s what you hear in the marketplace and what I hear from my business colleagues and industry sources. But is that the truth? You wouldn’t know because Quark refuses to counter that perception by investing in marketing, and I think that’s a mistake.

Their reasons for not doing so seem naïve to me. In my earlier interviews with Quark, vice president of corporate development Susie Friedman told me she finds it disheartening to “see this competition degenerate into [Adobe] spending millions of dollars of marketing to kill QuarkXPress.” In contrast, she said, Quark spends its money on product R&D for the publishing industry exclusively and on improving living conditions for the people who work at its engineering center in India. As I stated in my Macworld piece: “Quark says it refuses to get into a public relations battle with Adobe. When asked how Quark plans to prevent users from defecting to its rival, Friedman says simply: ‘We’ll just continue to put out the best product.'” Sorry, but I don’t think that’s enough. If Quark has a story to tell, it needs to do so.

Case in point: I unearthed a startling fact — at least it was startling to me: QuarkXPress still owns at least 90 percent of the desktop publishing market in terms of single unit sales. Now many people don’t believe me when I tell them that, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe it either until I saw the report with my own eyes. For the record, it wasn’t an internal Quark report but a Merrill-Lynch report on monthly sales data entitled “Technical & Design Software” and dated March 19, 2003. Quark could do a better job of getting the word out. (D’oh! Now I’m doing Quark’s marketing for them! I suddenly feel like a character in “Wag the Dog” or “Sweet Smell of Success.”)

InDesign is indeed making progress, the extent of which we don’t know because Adobe won’t reveal sales numbers (the aforementioned Merrill-Lynch report did say: “InDesign, though still a small product, at least in the retail channel, continued to show year/year growth, compared with a tiny revenue base in February 2002… We expect that Adobe can and will continue to improve its share against the legacy product from Quark.”) To gain converts, Adobe is right to target printers, service bureaus, and prepress shops as new customers because even today, back-end processes dictate adoption. Individual creative pros who want to produce InDesign files can, and should, apply pressure to get their service providers to accept that format, but if you work for a large publishing company that’s standardized on QuarkXPress, change may be slow in coming.

Ironically, after all is said and done, what may drive sales of QuarkXPress is inertia. (I tried to turn that word into an InDesign marketing slogan a la its earlier campaigns based on the phrases “Innovative”, “Inspiring”, “Integrated”, but “Inertia” didn’t work.)

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