In a comment on my post “I Shout ‘Quark Sucks!’ Loudest” Alan mentioned this survey. Apparently Quark, Inc. has finally taken its fists from over its ears and decided to ask customers what they think.
With questions like, “Please give Quark an overall rating for performance in… Customer Service and Product value compared to price” and “In what area do you think Quark most needs to improve,” it would appear old Fred Ebrahimi is finally feeling the pressure of Adobe’s competition. He couldn’t care less about Quark’s customers, so the only reason he would solicit customer feedback is because he knows he hasn’t a choice. Quark’s death bells have been chiming for some time–the entire industry knows that–but Ebrahimi has had his fists jammed into his ears while he chanted “la lalalala” at the top of his lungs. He must have finally heard the bells. He’s finally admitted that he knows Adobe and InDesign are going to kill his little one-application company.
So now he wants feedback from the customers, presumably as a precursor to making positive changes in the way Quark deals with its customers.
So, the real question is: Is it too little too late?
Take the survey. Tell Quark what you really think of it. In the comments area, feel free to tell Fred Ebrahimi Quark Sucks, and that I sent you.
5 responses to “Quark Starting To Care?”
Addendum: I thought I’d share the comments I left on Quark’s survey. In addition to honestly ansering their multiple-choice questions–some were favorable–I left this in the comments section:
More comments on page two:
LOL Quark will never read the above comments. The fourth and final section of the survey is broken. The entire survey gets tossed if the submit button on the fourth page isn’t pressed. The fourth page won’t load because Quark misprogrammed its Cold Fusion form.
Beautiful!
Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks!
I admin an ad agency with about 40 seats. We’ve only upgraded a couple to Quark 5 and one to 6 (product activation brings Quark to a whole new level of support suckitude) in favor of moving our users to Adobe’s CS suite. I’ve been receiving tons of email and a few calls from Quark virtually BEGGING me to upgrade our old 4 installations. They’ll give me a 5->6 upgrade for $99! They’re always kind of stunned when I tell them that’s still $99 too much.
And having just this moment finished wasting an hour of my time salvaging a corrupt Quark document with Markztools and sweat; I must say I’ll be damned before I encourage further use of that piece of junk on any machines I have to support.
Anybody EVER have to salvage an ID file?
Tuttle:
I’m sorry to hear about your Quark woes. Thanks for sharing them, but I’m sorry you experienced them.
Welcome to Quark Disappreciation Society, Brother Tuttle. All chant: “Quark Sucks!”
The good news is that, with an agency the size of yours, you should command enough respect from your print (etc.) vendors that switching to InDesign won’t cause you the vendor push-back many of the smaller agencies and freelancers have experienced.
Salvaging an InDesign file… Actually, occassionally InD files do get corrupted if the application crashes. Not with the frequency and almost predictability of Quark, but it does happen once in a great while. However, it’s no big deal. InD automatically creates mini-backups of the last working doc while you’re working on it. All you have to do is restore the backup to return to a fully functional, up-to-date .INDD file. InD creates mini-saves while you’re working on the file every one minute (but deletes them when you hit save). See this Adobe Tech article.
The only other problem with corrupt documents of which I’m aware is possible corruption when saving across a network or to removable media (rather than the local harddrive). The issue isn’t unique to InD, but it seemed for a while to get the most attention with InD (maybe because so many people were used to Quark routinely fouling its own files). If you ever need it, you’ll find info on that particular issue here.