Is QuarkXPress dead yet?

John Gruber recently posted some photos from Macworld 2008 on Flickr. The one that caught my eye was Quark Booth, Busy as Usual. It shows an almost empty Quark booth on the expo floor.

The comments on this photo are telling and quite funny:

“I had to open Quark just the other day to open a file from a client. First time I had opened it in two years. It made me feel gross. Oh, and of course, it crashed.”

QuarkXPress used to be the choice for design and publishing professionals when it came to page layout software. Unfortunately for Quark, they are losing market share to Adobe InDesign because they don’t know how to treat their customers.

“Bwah ha ha - you can only overcharge and under-serve your customers for so long. Suck it, Quark.”

I have always hated QuarkXPress. It never felt like a Macintosh program to me from the time I first used it in the early 90s. I preferred Aldus Pagemaker which Adobe purchased, killed and replaced with InDesign.

“our leopard upgrade coincided with the removal of quark from our workflow after 17 years! … they just got too hard to work with … its like they are stuck in 1997 … anyway - see ya later quark”

QuarkXPress’ attempts to compete with InDesign have been abysmal. Any of the OS X versions of the software I’ve used were always buggy, prone to crashing and clumsy to use. It’s amazing to me how a company can become a leader in their industry, ignore their customers and fade away.

Posted in OS X Software at 11:56 PM