BBC Switch to Adobe Not a Trend, Says Quark

Computer Business Review Online inter­views Gavin Drake, mar­ket­ing direc­tor of Quark Systems, Ltd., the UK arm of Colorado-based Quark, Inc., mak­er of would-be InDesign rival, QuarkXPress.

Following a series of announce­ments of high pro­file pub­lish­ers and cre­ative orga­ni­za­tions switch­ing from QuarkXPress-based pub­lish­ing and lay­out sys­tems to Adobe InDesign was last week’s dec­la­ra­tion of BBC Magazine’s migra­tion. After a sin­gle issue tri­al of InDesign on the It’s Hot! Magazine title in March 2003, BBC Magazine announced the switch from Quark to InDesign across its entire line of 40 titles.

Quark, mean­while, denies the exis­tance or build­ing of a Quark-to-InDesign switch­ing trend.

Says Drake in the Computer Busines Review Online inter­view: “There is no ques­tion that a small num­ber of cus­tomers have or are switch­ing to InDesign for var­i­ous rea­sons and we wish them every suc­cess in this. However you have to put this in con­text, which is that this rep­re­sents a very small per­cent­age of the UK mar­ket and is cer­tain­ly not a trend.”

Highlights from the article:

• QuarkXPress 6.5, the much tout­ed release that will include QuarkVista, will be a free upgrade to exist­ing Quark 6 users.
• Drake claims: “Some cus­tomers have told us that they believe the PDF out­put from QuarkXPress 6 is even bet­ter than that of InDesign so it would be untrue to sug­gest that the PDF sup­port in InDesign is better.”
• In response to a ques­tion regard­ing Quark’s “alleged­ly less-than-accommodating atti­tude towards its cus­tomers,” Drake states: “We are get­ting clos­er to our cus­tomers to ensure we are devel­op­ing tools to make them more pro­duc­tive and cre­ative and sec­ond­ly we are respond­ing to cus­tomer feed­back. Since Quark appoint­ed a new CEO at the begin­ning of this year there have been a huge num­ber of changes.”
• Quark has tripled the num­ber of field staff, includ­ing a report­ed 600% increase in the UK Team.
  Telephone sup­port staffing has been boost­ed by 30%.
• Quark, typically-and often per­ceived as contemptuously-absent from con­fer­ences and trade shows, is now attend­ing six times as many such events.
• QuarkAlliance was relaunched to “enable out­put providers, train­ing cen­ters, XTensions devel­op­ers and oth­er part­ners to work more close­ly with” Quark.
• BBC Worldwide pub­lish­ing sys­tems man­ag­er, Julian Adams, dis­cuss­es some of the rea­sons for his com­pa­ny’s swith to InDesign-citing increased effi­cien­cy with InDesign; bet­ter sup­port from Adobe; OS X native sup­port; InDesign’s use of trans­paren­cy and feath­er­ing, and tighter inte­gra­tion between InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
• Drake insists that Quark has by no means lost the desk­top pub­lish­ing wars, say­ing that, “QuarkXPress 6 has been the fastest sell­ing upgrade ever for Quark and QuarkXPress sales of both upgrades and full prod­ucts are extreme­ly strong and increasing.”
• Neither InDesign nor Quark run on Linux, and an unnamed Adobe spokesper­son stat­ed that there are “no immi­nent plans to launch a Unix or Linux ver­sion, but that the com­pa­ny would con­sid­er doing so if cus­tomers request­ed such a version.”

Very lit­tle of the Computer Business Review Online arti­cle is news to InDesign Vs. Quark read­ers. Interesting, how­ev­er, is the tone of the arti­cle: Quark is on the defen­sive. All com­par­isons not­ed by Quark-for exam­ple, Quark’s Drake insist­ing that “QuarkXPress 6 has been the fastest sell­ing upgrade ever for Quark and QuarkXPress sales of both upgrades and full prod­ucts are extreme­ly strong and increas­ing,” are one-sided. With the excep­tion of the hard to swal­low claim that Quark cre­ates bet­ter PDFs than InDesign, Drake shys from head-to-head com­par­isons between his lay­out appli­ca­tion and Adobe’s.

If a mar­ket­ing direc­tor can’t put the appli­ca­tions head-to-head in an inter­view, how does Quark expect to meet InDesign head-to-head in the market?