The difference between Quark and Adobe
Art D. Rector (3131 pencils) | Mon, 2012-04-30 16:44Just got off the phone with Quark. Here's the situation, last year I bought a new computer after using my G4 Powerbook for 10+ years - and I've upgraded all my software except for Quark. Basically it's been one of those things on the list I haven't gotten around to doing. So today is the day. I go to the website, look at the products page - full price is $999, upgrade price is $349 for version 9.2. The one I own (on my G4) is version 6.5 - 10 years and 3 major upgrades back. Call Quark, get a live person on the phone within 2 minutes - call, answer, pick an option (Opt 3: buy Quark), pick another option (Opt 1: buy Quark or Opt 2: ask questions first, then buy). I pick two, nice lady answers immediately, finds my name in the computer (registered Quark user since 1993) offers upgrade at regular price - $349. Folks - TEN YEARS LATER! I bought Quark 6 in 2002! Credit card info, "we'll send an email". Honestly - start to finish - from the time I picked up the phone until the time they sent the download code was LESS THAN 15 MINUTES. That's conversing with the Q rep - asking all the pertinent questions, checking my info, blah, blah, blah, etc... etc... Ready to install.
Now - compare that to the last time I tried to get Adobe on the phone. I wanted to buy the full on CS5 Designer's Suite - and was willing to pay the entire $1500. COULD NOT GET A SALES PERSON ON THE PHONE. After about 45 minutes of being switched around and eventually being cut off altogether 3 or 4 times I gave up on them. A SALESPERSON! What company doesn't let you get thru to a SALESPERSON??? Lucky for me though, because I ended up getting the full-on CS5 for $400 thru a friend instead. :-)
However - you get the point. One company cares.
Commenting on this Forum topic will be automatically closed on June 25, 2012.
My experience exactly. I upgraded to 9.2 from 6.5 late last year. When I had a little trouble with printer interface (I think -- don't really remember), I called, they answered, fixed my problem, bingo. I love Quark. As I've said before, I'll use InDesign if I can't avoid it, but every experience I've had with Adobe has ended in drinking and drug abuse, so....
Mara
It does seem to be the cycle of business:
When they are hungry they listen to, talk to and work for/with customers.
When they get too big they stop all that and focus on getting bigger.
(There are definitely people within Adobe committed to customers and to making things work - but they seem to be hobbled by the sheer scale of the Adobe machine.)
Good point, Alex. I remember when Quark caught an awful lot of flak for being arrogant and unresponsive. But that was, like, over 20 years ago when their competitor was Aldus PageMaker, later to be absorbed by Adobe. Ah, the good old days. *shudder*
Mara
I always felt uncomfortable with Quark, so ik kept working with Pagemaker.
I had Quark installed until version 3.1, you know that dongled version.
When my dongle gave up I just quit Quark.
In their arrogant days I also remember that if you had an earlier version and you wanted the new one, you always had to pay the price, there was no upgrading system. And all your older Xtensions (ways to make Quark more powerfull, like tables and so on), you had to buy all those Xtensions over again because they didn't work anymore with the newer version.
All companies tend to become arrogant if they have no contenders on the market.
That was Quark Passport. The standard Quark app never used a dongle.
The big problem with Pagemaker was on the production end. I still have nightmares about Aldus PrePrint and how it always frakked up the color. Back then I could look at any magazine and tell you if they were using Pagemaker because the only "red" you could get out of PrePrint was that 100M/100Y tomato color.
I could get any colour out of Pagemaker, the only problem that I encountered was on the high end printers side. Their machines were organised for the Quark workflow on the colour side. I figured out some workarounds, never had any problem.
That's what I'm referring to - high end film production. In the days before PDF files, film was printed directly from the native application (or the native application's separation program) to the imagesetter. It's no different than you printing the files on your laserwriter or inkjet except an imagesetter has a much higher resolution and the color is separated into the four process colors (cmyk). So if your production facility was running your files thru a "Quark workflow" - they were doing it wrong. But they were probably doing it for the right reason - because that was THEIR workaround for Pagemaker files which were a pain in the ass to print.
But you don't have to take my word for it - Adobe bought Aldus specifically to get Pagemaker so they could own a piece of the page layout marketplace and compete with Quark. After a couple PM upgrades, even ADOBE gave up on ever fixing PM so it would work correctly and instead created InDesign from scratch to replace it altogether. Adobe is the company that created Postscript - the printer language that describes what ends up on the printed page. They are the gold standard when it comes to Postscript integrity and THEY decided to trash PageMaker.
I've never had any trouble with Quark - they've always been responsive and by far the easiest company to contact and get an actual person on the line in my experience. But business associates and peers I respect have had the opposite experience - so maybe I've just been lucky. The main thing I don't like about Adobe is they seem to spend most of their time trying to figure out new ways to pick our pockets.
Do you guys remember an layout application called Canvas? I was freelancing for a defense contractor one time that made me use it. They actually have me the whole package and when I tried to return it, they wouldn't take it. Anyway, this was back in something like 1991 and it was a really robust app. It did a lot of what PageMaker, Quark eventually did and even had its own built-in pretty-good (for those days) graphics capability. I wonder what happened to it. Anybody know?
Mara
It's actually still around...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACD_Canvas
I used it in the early days too. The company I worked for was one of those "spare no expense!" companies that bought everything the computer rep recommended when we purchased our Mac system, so we had every software package known to man - including Canvas. It was pretty good for image manipulation in the days before Photoshop (we're dinosaurs! :) It never really caught on with the graphics crowd because it wasn't REAL good at anything except technical drawings (which is why your defense contractor probably wanted you to use it). Photoshop and Postscript killed it with designers imho. Everyone was already using PM and Quark for page layout and Illustrator and Freehand to draw, then Photoshop came along and took the image manipulation market away from Canvas. So the only thing left was technical drawings - which is what they specialize in now. It's a niche software package these days.
Deneba is located down here in Miami - a friend of mine was dating one of their earliest employees (I believe she was the 6th person the company hired).