Quark "Parts Ways" with CEO

[Stephen Owades]

The news stories thus far (http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1759,1826049,00.asp) don't say much about what's actually going on, but Kamar Aulakh, the CEO of Quark who succeeded Fred Ebrahimi, has left the company. Whether he's jumped or been pushed isn't clear. The interim successor will be Linda Chase, who has been (and will remain) senior vice president of commerce product development, and the company has engaged an executive search firm to find a new CEO.

I'm sure that the success of Adobe's Creative Suite is making things harder for Quark these days. When Microsoft introduced their Office suite, converting users of Word or Excel into users of the whole suite, it had a major impact on Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect--both because of the integration among Office products and because those users now had all the Office products on their systems. Similarly, InDesign is surely benefiting from the Creative Suite bundling that gets it onto machines that may formerly have been running only Photoshop or Illustrator. How Quark can respond to this isn't clear, and probably isn't clear to them either. The sort of increased focus on customer satisfaction that they've been talking about in recent years (see the press release) is a good start. But I hope that the suggestions that Quark has been too product-focused in the past don't indicate that they're planning to put fewer resources into making major improvements in the core product.

[imatt]

I'm sure that the success of Adobe's Creative Suite is making things harder for Quark these days. When Microsoft introduced their Office suite, converting users of Word or Excel into users of the whole suite, it had a major impact on Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect--both because of the integration among Office products and because those users now had all the Office products on their systems. Similarly, InDesign is surely benefiting from the Creative Suite bundling that gets it onto machines that may formerly have been running only Photoshop or Illustrator.

I quite agree Stephen. Quark missed the boat big time when it sat back on its laurels and failed to produce a competent competitor to Photoshop and Illustrator.

Remember QuarkXposure?? This was supposed to be the next big thing to rival Photoshop. Suprise, suprise, it never took off.

What Quark seems to do is bolt on all manner of add ons such as QuarkWrapture (a package design plug in despite package design being better achieved in a vector app) and QarkVista, a Photoshop capapble plug in allowing an Xpress user to import native Photoshop files and edit each individual layer.

All very good, but this makes Xpress not only more bloated but less foucussed in it's core page layout functions.

If the Adobe - macromedia deal gets the go ahead, then Quark will be even more marginalised as I for one thought Macromedia and Quark could merge.

QuarkXpress will continue to lose market share until it gets to a point of keeping it's core hardcore users - a bit like PageMaker by the mid 90's. The question is, will it still be a viable company..???

[donmcc]

I think Quark missed the boat by trying to add new products. Photoshop is pretty much assailable. Perhaps MS could take a run at it, but it would have to be a pretty amazing product to surpass it. People don't switch for something "a little bit better". Quark was miles ahead of the early Pagemaker, and that got it a leadership position.

The problem is, Quark has failed to maintain that edge. ID is now equal, or perhaps slightly better than Quark (though not enough that people are flocking to it in droves). Quark dabbled with web stuff, when that was hot, and has tried to add other programs from time to time. Meanwhile, the program that pays the bills has languished and allowed Adobe to catch up.

And that does not even bring into account the abysmal customer service the company provides ... has it been outsourced to Mars yet?

Don McCahill