Lesson: Choose Your Positive Press Carefully

In the ongoing tug of war on the hearts and minds of designers and layout artists everywhere, Quark, Inc. links to positive press to make its case. But should Quark be a little more careful about what they link to?

Updated 24 October, 23:15 PT
Updated 25 October, 23:15 PT

New Quark Logo

Just about every­body who has a com­mer­cial pres­ence of some sort, if they’re smart, link to pos­titve notices about them in the press. Mind share is all impor­tant in the bat­tle for the hearts, minds, and dol­lars of design­ers and users of lay­out soft­ware every­where these days.

Quark proves this with its pub­lic rela­tions moves, most notably with its recent rebrand­ing and redesign­ing of the Quark logo and look. And, like many oth­er sim­i­lar enter­pris­es, a depart­ment of the Quark web pres­ence is devot­ed to pos­ti­tive pub­lic­i­ty; Quark calls it “In The News”. The cur­rent top sto­ry, “Will Adobe Manage to Replace Industry Work Horse QuarkXPress”, was­n’t orig­i­nal­ly titled that way; more­over, the cred­it, a blog called “Hardworking Clown”, is not where the link goes back to…

But I digress. The actu­al sto­ry is a lit­tle strange, and is guar­an­teed to leave one scratch­ing one’s head.

Send in the Clown

On the 14th of October, a blog called “Hardworking Clown” pub­lished an arti­cle with a title most strange: Will Adobe Manage to Replace Industry Work Horse Quark Express by Giving Adobe InDesign for Free?. What A Great Night.

The blog in ques­tion is called Hardworking Clown, and has exist­ed since only September 2005. It seems to con­sist of noth­ing more than arti­cles reprint­ed from a con­tent ven­dor called EZineArticles​.com, sprin­kled with illos that are essen­tial­ly information-free adver­tise­ments. Moreover, each post seems to be not one but two EzineArticles​.com arti­cles on unre­lat­ed sub­jects stuck togeth­er; the lat­ter half of the post­ing, titled “What a Great Night”, seems to con­cern itself with a base­ball game.

Clown? Maybe. Hardworking? I will leave this as an exer­cise for the reader.

Naming your own price?

Once again, I digress. The arti­cle’s cen­tral argu­ment, which holds that Adobe is attempt­ing to sup­plant Quark by the Microsoft-style embed and con­quer (which was what it was try­ing to do with Internet Explorer) strat­e­gy. The argu­ment seems but­tressed in the main by list­ing the prices of each com­po­nent of the CS2 sep­a­rate­ly, as if some­one would buy the entire CS2 sep­a­rate­ly instead of get­ting the con­sol­i­dat­ed suite.

Here’s their pri­ma­ry exhibit:

  • Adobe Acrobat (“1 user”) $383.73
  • Adobe GoLive $386.15
  • Adobe Illustrator $480.67
  • Adobe InDesign $676.79
  • Adobe Photoshop $548.51 (only Photoshop + Illustrator are $1030 at these prices)

They con­clude:

  • The val­ue of the retail prod­ucts is $2475.85. so, InDesign is absolute­ly FREE.

I am cer­tain­ly no expert on rhetor­i­cal fig­ures, but this seems to be a large part “straw-man” (posit­ing a notion­al naîf who would actu­al­ly go out and buy the entire CS piece­meal) and one huge part leap of illogic–at least, the log­i­cal path from buy­ing the CS2 at the reg­u­lar retail price to get­ting InDesign for free if on buys all parts at thi­er piece­meal prices, seems indi­rect at best (and about as awk­ward as this last sentence).

The real head-scratchers are the prices, with all the odd cent amounts on. This is some­thing that can, pre­sum­ably be checked. 

Adobe Acrobat is quot­ed by the writ­ers as being at a street price of $383.73. That seventy-three cents does­n’t sound like Adobe’s style, and there isn’t mere­ly one ver­sion of “Acrobat (1‑user)” avail­able, but two; Acrobat 7 Pro (the more expen­sive, feature-endowed ver­sion) and Acrobat 7 Standard (for the aver­age Joe who also hap­pens to want to cre­ate PDFs).

Acrobat 7 Professional boasts the fol­low­ing pric­ing (from the Adobe web­site at www​.adobe​.com):

  • Acrobat 7 Professional full: $449.00
  • Acrobat 7 Professional upgrade (from Acrobat 6): $159.00
  • Acrobat 7 Standard full: $299.00
  • Acrobat 7 Standard upgrade (from Acrobat 6): $99.00

And that’s from Adobe, direct­ly which, if you can, is the method I rec­om­mend any­one buy Adobe soft­ware. If you go with dis­count hous­es, be extreme­ly care­ful. Many places can pro­vide you with excu­ci­at­ing­ly low prices on high-end graph­ics soft­ware, but fre­quent­ly they are cracked and hacked versions.

Also, note the com­par­a­tive­ly deeply dis­count­ed prices for upgraders. This is a suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy on Adobe’s part that enables many users to stay cur­rent. Upgrading from CS to CS2 amounts to about 1/2 the cost of orig­i­nal entry.

Interested in where the authors got that price on Adobe Acrobat, I ran the search term Adobe Acrobat $383.73 through Google. Nine results were returned. Only three of them linked exact. They were all links to oth­er sites run­ning that par­tic­u­lar arti­cle. I could find absolute­ly no links to any sites any­where sell­ing any Adobe Acrobat for $383.73. Why the odd amount? Shipping charges includ­ed? The authors leave absolute­ly no clue as to how they arrived at their figures.

A bit lat­er on in the arti­cle the authors note that at soft­ware reseller AtomicPark​.com (which seems to have a sol­id rep­u­ta­tion behind it) offers QuarkXPress for $707.00 (you still appar­ent­ly have to go to the Quark site to get the free 6.5 upgrade). That much is true. What the authors odd­ly leave out is that if you go to the Quark cor­po­rate web­site you can get QuarkXPress 6.5 for $699.00 now.

More fun facts and wordplay

The arti­cle car­ries on sim­i­lar­ly in oth­er ways: that Adobe claims InDesign will “kill” Quark (the title was bestowed by the media, not Adobe), that Adobe bought Aldus and Pagemaker to “kill” Quark (not exact­ly), that Adobe’s cre­ation of the Creative Suite is an ille­gal bundling strat­e­gy to lock in cus­tomers to InDesign (then why isn’t Quark tak­ing Adobe to court?), inscrutable num­bers on train­ing time and learn­ing curve which I can’t trust, giv­en the price dis­cus­sions above, and the require­ment of get­ting new com­put­ers, blunt­ly assert­ing “old­er com­put­ers (let’s say 1 year old) will choke and kill your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty try­ing to run the new Creative Suite 2, and wait­ing for any­thing to load, and run. You need a new com­put­er to run the soft­ware, peri­od”. To be blunt, that’s asi­nine; my set­up is a PowerMac G4 dual-processor 1.25 GHz “Mirrored Drive Door” mod­el from 2003. It runs them accept­ably well. This com­put­er is two years old.

The bot­tom line here is that the arti­cle is, in my opin­ion, wrong. What’s more sur­pris­ing is that is was authored by two authors who, judg­ing by thi­er cre­den­tials, I’d expect more pol­ished insights.

That Quark would link to such an arti­cle so promi­nent­ly just leaves me scratch­ing my head. Just what is going on over there in Quarkville?

But wait, there's less!

The mere link­ing to such a strangely-presented arti­cle is one thing. Few sto­ries, which would oth­er­wise be insignif­i­cant if han­dled bet­ter, have such a strange afterlife.

Originally, on or about the 15th of October, the arti­cle was post­ed to the Quark web page with the title Will Adobe Manage to Replace Industry Work Horse Quark Express by Giving Adobe InDesign for Free? left intact, even as to spelling. Quark, on its own front page, ignored an egre­gious mis­se­pelling of its flag­ship, sig­na­ture prod­uct. For a com­pa­ny renowned for its recent atten­tive care of its pub­lic image, this sort of thing sticks out like a sore thumb.

By the 19th of October, some­one at Quark must have real­ized how that looked, for it was then changed to sim­ply Will Adobe Manage To Replace Industry Work Horse…, which was still linked to the “Hardworking Clown” posting.

Today, 24 October 2005, was found yet anoth­er change: the title now links to the busi­ness blog of one of the actu­al co-authors of the actu­al arti­cle, and now reads Will Adobe Manage To Replace Industry Work Horse QuarkXPress . But that’s not all: the link cred­it (in small type in green just below the title still cred­its the Hardworking Clown. 

It all leaves one won­der­ing where this news item will go next. A final warn­ing: if one choos­es to pro­ceed to the author’s blog site, please be kind to them. She’s tak­en a fair beat­ing; the com­ments left on it are not for the faint of heart, or for chil­drens eyes.

And the bat­tle rages on.

See Quark’s “In The News” page, and the link to the arti­cle. [Link to arti­cle removed from that page 25 Oct 2005 –Ed.]

Update, 24 Oct 2005, 20:45 PDT approximate

Within what must have been mere min­utes after post­ing the above arti­cle, the author of the arti­cle has delet­ed all com­ments and turned off com­ment­ing for the entry (click here to go straight to it at “Valor Crossmedia”).

There is still a link to a ref­er­ence arti­cle, which turns out to be a review of InDesign CS2 that details why a per­od­i­cal (the newslet­ter of the Chicago-area Mac User Group “The NorthWest of Us”) switched away from Quark to InDesign. How this review, which details less than sat­is­fac­to­ry inter­ac­tion with Quark and XPress 6 con­trast­ed with supe­ri­or treat­ment from the Adobe rep, is a suit­able ref­er­ence for the arti­cle is anoth­er exer­cise for the reader.

The arti­cle has also caught fire in the Quark Forums (with an open­ing post that broke the dis­play), includ­ing a response from the author Galina Arlov.

Update: PDF of original article and comments

24 Oct 2005, 23:15 PDT (by Pariah S. Burke)

The Quark VS InDesign​.com staff has learned that, in cas­es like this “Will Adobe Manage To Replace Industry Work Horse…” arti­cle, which jumped sites, changed arti­cle con­tent post-publication with­out divulging that fact, and delet­ed read­er com­ments (at least once), proof is every­thing. So, of course, we made a PDF of the article–including com­ments from read­ers of the article.

Although at least one read­er com­ment was removed pri­or to our see­ing it (not­ed inline as “removed by the [com­ment] author”), the rest are intact despite the site own­er’s delib­er­ate dele­tion of all comments.

Here, for your ben­e­fit, is the arti­cle as of 24 October 2005, 19:25 PT. (PDF, 98kb)

And, mis­spelling of “Quark Express” and all, is the ver­sion of the same arti­cle as stored in Google’s cache from 12 October, 2005, 08:46 GMT. (PDF, 139kb)

Update: Quark, Inc. removes link to story from its news site

25 Oct 2005, 23:15 PDT (by Samuel John Klein)

Sometime dur­ing the day, 25 Oct 05, Quark, Incorporated removed the link to the sto­ry from it’s “In The News” page. The sto­ry now at the top of the list is the link to the X‑Ray Magazine promotion.

The arti­cle is still post­ed at the Valor Cross Media site (linked above).

20 thoughts on “Lesson: Choose Your Positive Press Carefully

  1. Jim Oblak

    Perhaps since Galina Arlov used this whole exer­cise as a way to boost link pop­u­lar­i­ty, you could dis­able direct link­ing to her blog from this arti­cle. Readers could man­u­al­ly copy the URL from this arti­cle and paste into their brows­er so Galina does not receive any more link popularity.

  2. Pariah S. Burke

    Hi, Jim.

    Excellent point. Rather than remove the hyper­link, which impacts read­ers’ usabil­i­ty, I’ve insert­ed “rel=‘nofollow’ ” attrib­ut­es on the links to Galina’s sites. That will pre­vent at least the major search engines from using Quark VS InDesign.com’s pop­u­lar­i­ty and rank­ings to increase Galina’s.

  3. Dick Sugarman

    Only some­one who sports the name “pariah” with a string of failed busi­ness­es and noth­ing impor­tant to show for it and a writer of sci­ence fic­tion who has a HORRIBLE web­site that seems designed by a blind mon­key (samuel designed http://​www​.sci​encefic​tion​mu​se​um​.org go check it out and donate some mon­ey, he real­ly could use it), goons close­ly involved with Adobe as we all know you are, could post such a bunch of lies in your website. 

    In fact it seems obvi­ous that it might have been you who start­ed this whole mess at the Quark web­site to dis­cred­it Quark. Shame on you, Pariah, Oblak, and Klein, what else could be expect­ed from you on a site that ben­e­fits direct­ly from Adobe prod­uct hype and google adwords in exchange for your hatred, well-stated in your own words?

    You are OUTRAGEOUS liars. Note the com­ments you made in your arti­cle. I actu­al­ly com­pared what you say and what the writer said and you are shame­less­ly lying about the con­tent and throw­ing in dirt of your own. What else could be expect­ed from you, liars? I saved a PDF of your arti­cle, just in case you want to change your arti­cle and I’ll for­ward it to the author, because obvi­ous­ly those peo­ple they have no idea that they are being back­stabbed with­out the cour­tesy of being con­tact­ed to ver­i­fy the facts. You even com­plain that the author FIXED a typo? what are you, morons? was the author sup­posed to LEAVE the typo????

    It stinks of cor­po­rate PR and mar­ket­ing in your web­site, since you pro­vide so many advertorial-like writ­ing in what­ev­er you write. You even made a prod­uct pro­mo­tion and kissed butt in the mid­dle of your arti­cle!! ha!. unbe­liev­able lack of ethics. You guys are just SO wrong.

    Reading what you wrote, it’s clear that you aren’t inter­est­ed in the truth, but only in how to dis­cred­it what is obvi­ous fact and is (after a quick check) an accept­able prod­uct quote wide­ly found in com­par­i­son price web­sites. You even made an adver­tis­ing piece for Adobe and ask peo­ple to go buy direct­ly at Adobe! Don’t you have any shame, inter­net mar­keters? Of course, you must be mak­ing mon­ey out of these sales… what can we expect?

    I was curi­ous about what you wrote and to see what the arti­cle was about, and I noticed that you mis­rep­re­sent­ed and inten­tion­al­ly rewrit­ten stuff that is not even in the arti­cle writ­ten by the blog­ger who is being bashed here. You should be ashamed! you should be politi­cians, because you sure run here a lies machine in your outfit.

    After read­ing what you write in your web­site, it’s so obvi­ous that you are just a part of the Adobe machine want­i­ng to gob­ble every sin­gle com­pa­ny out there in direct com­pe­ti­tion with them. Aldus, Pagemaker, now Macromedia and every­body else, what is going to be next? are we sup­posed to be afraid of Adobe, and as you made it rather evi­dent, you sug­gest that Quark SHOULD sue Adobe for prod­uct dump­ing. Heck, per­haps they should!

    Finally, and much worse, with­out actu­al­ly ver­i­fy­ing the facts, with no idea of what you are say­ing (for you acknowl­edge that you have no idea of what you are talk­ing about) you write that the data must be wrong, but you accept that your affir­ma­tion is only hearsay and of your own mak­ing with­out offer­ing any hard evi­dence, and after print­ing lies after lies.
    What kind of moron makes those kinds of state­ments? Only you could do some­thing like that, and want your read­ers to accept as fact some­thing where you don’t even have an idea of what you are talk­ing about, and can’t con­clu­sive­ly prove what you say.
    Why is it that igno­rants always say that they know bet­ter before they even find the truth, and they have to find out they were gross­ly mis­tak­en after they lose their house? this is the rea­son why peo­ple get mur­dered for no fault of their own: peo­ple don’t care to ver­i­fy the facts. 

    This is not the first time you have lied about some­thing and it won’t be the last. after all you are just agents from Adobe seek­ing to take over who­ev­er oppos­es you. You like to hide the fact that Adobe is becom­ing just anoth­er big abu­sive cor­po­ra­tion… anoth­er Microsoft like the arti­cle said.

    And you are the grunts doing their dirty work. Shame on you, liars! Don’t you have some decen­cy left? at least READ and ver­i­fy before you write some­thing? the same could apply to the rest of your site…

    Samuel… why don’t you hire a REAL pro­fes­sion­al to cre­ate your web­site? it’s just yet anoth­er shame for you. take it offline… it would look bet­ter that way.

    As for you, Pariah, you write in your home­page: “First and fore­most, Designorati is about passion,” says Publisher and founder, Pariah S. Burke. “Creation is pas­sion, and any writ­ing about, or in sup­port of, pas­sion must itself arise from passion.

    What a bunch of lies! “cre­ation is pas­sion, blah,blah, and pas­sion must arise from pas­sion?” lol! com­ing from a hip­pie who can’t do any­thing right, do tell, where did you pick up that line? a bar?

    As for you, Jim Oblak, are you the guy who works shoot­ing pics of naked men at a cer­tain web­site? why don’t you let us know who you are? don’t be shy!

    fools!

  4. Nick G.

    I took the time to read the arti­cle you are bash­ing and it is ille­gal to go around mak­ing up sto­ries about oth­ers like you peo­ple do. I’ve been com­ing to this site for a long time now and I always have found neg­a­tive com­ments from oth­er peo­ple in dif­fer­ent web­sites flam­ing Pariah and this site for one or anoth­er rea­son. This so called “arti­cle” is no excep­tion to the rule of encoun­ter­ing biased, incom­plete and inac­cu­rate con­tent in this website.

    What you write this time not only is biased, mis­lead­ing and inac­cu­rate, but it is clum­si­ly writ­ten with plen­ty of assump­tions and non-sequiturs, much like a not-so-subtle paid PR and mar­ket­ing arti­cle, noth­ing more. it seemed more like a wait­er tout­ing a cheap restau­rant and pro­mot­ing it’s spe­cial for the day, while rap­ping the shop next door. pff… could­n’t you be less obvious?

    Reading yet anoth­er mali­cious lie pub­lished in your site is infuriating. :(
    You are so arro­gant and jad­ed that you don’t care any­more what peo­ple think and you write with­out thinking.

    And give me a break, this is not the only time you guys have screwed up. You just keep doing it.
    By the way, it should be obvi­ous by now that nobody would be invest­ing their lives into main­tain­ing this web­site unless you were direct­ly ben­e­fit­ting by your endorse­ment of Adobe prod­ucts. That says it all about the kind of biased reviews we find here and how “impar­tial” they are. 

    IMHO, you guys are plain wrong and this mali­cious­ly writ­ten, inac­cu­rate and mis­lead­ing “arti­cle” you pub­lished is yet anoth­er proof of half-assed, dim-witted pen­man­ship and irre­spon­si­ble, inco­her­ent dam­age con­trol PR work paid off by Adobe. Shame on you!

  5. Pariah S. Burke

    Official Statement of Quark VS InDesign.com’s Editorial Policy Regarding Advertising and Advertisers

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    Full dis­clo­sure: Some staff mem­bers of Quark VS InDesign​.com receive com­pli­men­ta­ry sub­scrip­tions to indus­try peri­od­i­cals that may be writ­ten about in arti­cles pub­lished by Quark VS InDesign​.com. It is stan­dard prac­tice among the news media to pro­vide com­pli­men­ta­ry sub­scrip­tions to oth­er mem­bers of the media. This prac­tice is a pro­fes­sion­al cour­tesy only, and does not entail incen­tive for, requests for, or promis­es of, edi­to­r­i­al cov­er­age or bias.

    Shareholder: This Website is pri­vate­ly owned and fund­ed by its pub­lish­er and sole share­hold­er, Pariah S. Burke.

  6. mitch m.

    This arti­cle is nasty!. The author is out­right rewrit­ing the arti­cle from the blog and mak­ing up stuff that isn’t there! wow! I had nev­er seen any­one go and REWRITE what some­body else said and then start mak­ing up sto­ries and based on it. isn’t that defama­tion? Doesn’t that make this site a defam­a­to­ry web­hole where any­one can come and pub­lish fab­ri­ca­tions? in my view, that is immoral and wrong… it makes a farce of the whole argu­ment pre­sent­ed by the arti­cle and makes one won­der about the true motives of the author who wrote it.

    In addi­tion to this, the “offi­cial state­ment” does­n’t make sense. Your arti­cles are endorse­ments and dis­guised adver­to­ri­als for Adobe prod­ucts. Your “staff” writes try­ing to sell the user more Adobe prod­ucts and this arti­cle is a per­fect exam­ple of that. You are sure­ly being paid off by Adobe, in one or anoth­er way. You state that you live off adver­tis­ing. Who pays for the adver­tis­ing of Adobe prod­ucts but Adobe and Adobe prod­uct sell­ing com­pa­nies? that makes you nec­es­sar­i­ly par­tial and sub­ject to fol­low­ing the guide­lines from these adver­tis­ers, or else you would make no mon­ey and they would cut you off.
    I don’t buy your sto­ry and nobody should.

    And nobody should vis­it a site that pro­motes lies and where the authors and web­mas­ters who write arti­cles are allowed to slan­der, defa­mate and fal­si­fy infor­ma­tion. That is fraud if I have seen one!

    you’re a fraud!

  7. Pariah S. Burke

    For the record, the com­ments from Dick Sugarman, Nick G., and Mitch M. were all sub­mit­ted from the same IP address.

    This Virginia-based indi­vid­ual has played this ruse on Quark VS InDesign​.com before.

  8. Samuel John Klein

    Pariah:

    I see. That’s just bizarre. What would dri­ve a per­son to do that?

    This has been fas­ci­nat­ing expe­ri­ence to say the least. When I first saw the link in the Quark cor­po­rate news sec­tion, I actu­al­ly read it kind of eager­ly. The idea of Adobe being accused of con­niv­ing to under­mine the mar­ket by “giv­ing away InDesign for free” struck me as an amaz­ing asser­tion, and I was eager to find out how the log­ic of that played out. When I read the Arlov arti­cle it just struck me as so wide of the mark I almost could­nt not respond.

    With no actu­al dis­re­spect meant toward Arlov and her co-author, the arti­cle mak­ing the “free InDesign” claim was, to be kind„ dodgy. Now, I’ll admit freely I’m no insider–my cards have always been on the table in this respect–but I don’t think you have to be an insid­er to have seen that the asser­tions made in the arti­cle were sim­ply wrong.

    Was the arti­cle a bit mock­ing? I sup­pose. But it was in good fun and real­ly not all that insult­ing of Quark. If any­thing, the ques­tion I had (and still do) is, why would a com­pa­ny like Quark link to such shab­by con­tent? I expect bet­ter of Quark, and I was gob­stopped to see that Quark felt the arti­cle was worth link­ing to at all.

    The qual­i­ty of the respons­es on this thread from the peo­ple (per­son?) who attacked in leave me in a bit of despair about human nature, as well. Loaded with tox­ic accu­sa­tions and bad log­ic, they do more to gen­er­ate pity from me toward the poster than any­thing else, leav­ing aside the per­son­al threat to life and prop­er­ty embed­ded in one of them.

    The accu­sa­tions, of course, are so patent­ly ridicu­lous they deserve (and shall get) no rebut­tal. But there is a com­ment that I think needs to be said.

    The accu­sa­tion seems to be that I/we are some­how com­pen­sat­ed shills for Adobe. For what it’s worth, for all the writ­ing I’ve done here, when all was said and done, I had to earn my own mon­ey for my copy of CS2 Premium. I am a paid, reg­is­tered user of CS2, from my own pock­et. As I am with QuarkXPress; I have a reg­is­tered copy of QXP 6.5 that I paid for, with mon­ey from actu­al work.

    Therefore, as a paid cus­tomer of Quark, Quark’s suc­cess is some­thing of an inter­est to me. Why would I seek to under­mine it? Every word I’ve ever uttered about Quark comes from reac­tions borne of per­son­al expe­ri­ence. I report what I find. I don’t make things up.

    I think Quark can do bet­ter. I believe it’s try­ing. I want to encour­age them to keep that up.

  9. g.b

    This one-man-show is just plain fun­ny. Pariah, Samuel, and all your mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties, you know what is fun? you pose ques­tions to your­self, and you answer your­self in the same blog. loll

    I’m a con­sumer, and an user of the soft­ware. I think that every­one is enti­tled to their opin­ion, not only you. you should not crit­i­cize peo­ple just because you don’t like the way they think. Particularly when it says clear­ly in your arti­cle that you aren’t cer­tain of what you are say­ing. To use your own expres­sion, that is asi­nine and bigoted.

    Now if by any remote chances you are real­ly a bunch of guys with noth­ing bet­ter to do with their time, and you all think the way you write, then this web­site is plain ridicu­lous, this arti­cle has become a faux opera and is giv­ing you real­ly bad pub­lic­i­ty. After read­ing your remarks and see­ing that the prob­lems in this forum have been going on for a long while and oth­er peo­ple have rebuked what you say, I think that it is not a mat­ter of a one-person prob­lem, and you have trou­ble with many oth­er peo­ple, god knows how many. You are the problem.
    you say that peo­ple have been hav­ing trou­ble with you for god knows how long. I think it’s dis­gust­ing and many peo­ple are sim­ply telling you what they think about you. If you feel threat­ened, why write things that aren’t true? so stop mis­be­hav­ing and be hon­est, that way peo­ple would­n’t send you com­ments unbecoming.

    I have been read­ing this whole arti­cle ever since you guys start­ed a war in the Quark forums, because you can’t deny it was you, isn’t it true. You want pub­lic­i­ty so des­per­ate­ly, and you got jeal­ous that some­body else got pub­lished at Quark and not you. So if you want­ed to steal pub­lic­i­ty, I think you got it all wrong. peo­ple are mak­ing some com­ments about you that BROKE my screen. it’s all about greed and the green-eyed mon­ster of jealousy. 

    You also come off as women-haters, as you are gang­ing up on a woman who did­n’t do any­thing to you. I have read some strange com­ments and arti­cles out there, but I had nev­er seen such a response to any of them. Might it be that a very marked misog­y­nism runs deeply entrenched here at Quark Vs. Indesign? I think so.

    Now you are com­plain­ing and try­ing to make your wrong point in a rather apolo­get­i­cal (but still flawed) man­ner, because you offend­ed some­one who knows you for a long time, as it seems appar­ent from the com­ments being post­ed. They actu­al­ly seem very rea­son­able giv­en the facts. If you are wrong, you are wrong and you might as well admit it.

    The point is that some­body took issue with your mis­tak­en argu­ments. I read the poster’s com­ments, the blog in ques­tion, and I also found that you are mis­quot­ing the author of that blog. Re-read what you wrote and you will find gross inac­cu­ra­cies that inval­i­date the whole con­tents of this laugh­able exer­cise in defi­cient copywriting. 

    Even worse, you are clear in admit­ting that you have no idea of why you are wrong. your log­ic is twist­ed, and bogus.

    I also ques­tion this parade of inac­cu­ra­cies and false log­ic. Might it be that this web­site is just a lone author (The Pariah), and the oth­er “char­ac­ters” are just an inven­tion of his mind? 

    It is rather obvi­ous that the posters in the forum are, you, you, and you. why peo­ple who are so evi­dent­ly anti-Quark and pro-Adobe
    I read your arti­cle, the answers that you received, and I also found that in fact you lied in your review. You say that the replies you got are the prod­uct of an old ene­my (or ene­mies) of yours? that’s a laugh­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. as for the “same ip address” that sounds fishy to me. pub­lish the address­es? did you know that there are sev­er­al MAJOR net­works being used in the U.S. which cor­re­spond to the dif­fer­ent CARRIERS pro­vid­ing ser­vice? if the peo­ple who wrote to you hap­pened to have the same major provider (say AT&T, CA Phone, Verizon, etc.) they all would seem to be from the same net­work, even when they are in dif­fer­ent cities. lol. that’s why you aren’t sure who wrote. get your game together.

    I don’t buy what you are say­ing, because now you are say­ing that your old ene­mies are try­ing to scare you. but that does­n’t make you right. You are still wrong and your arti­cle con­tin­ues to be wrong, after look­ing at what you have said and what is being said about you. I think it’s just peo­ple who are not will­ing to take it any­more. stop doing things wrong. do things the right way. that way, peo­ple would respect you and you would­n’t have to deal with the com­ments from your old “ene­mies”, if there is such a thing. 

    it is you who ARE wrong.

  10. Alon

    Long, ram­bling, sense­less posts … all say­ing the same clue­less things … 

    It’s pret­ty darned obvi­ous that they’re all from the same person.

  11. Victor Oleny

    “Quark VS InDesign​.com is an inde­pen­dent and unbi­ased news and edi­to­r­i­al Website that is not affli­at­ed with any of the com­pa­nies about whom or whose prod­ucts it writes or may write.”

    If it’s such an unbi­ased web­site, how come it has a pre­pon­der­ance of arti­cles advo­cat­ing InDesign and bash­ing QuarkXPress way beyond what is stas­ti­cal­ly nor­mal? Unbiased, my foot.

  12. Pariah S. Burke

    Good ques­tion, Victor. So good, in fact, that I bet you’re not the only read­er ask­ing it.

    Instead of respond­ing here, where few may see it, I’ve respond­ed in a new arti­cle for the ben­e­fit of any­one who might be ask­ing the same thing. It’s here.

  13. Jim Oblak

    Since it was asked by some­one claim­ing to be a Dick Sugarman…

    Who am I? I am nobody special. 

    I don’t need to show you a pedi­gree or a vast port­fo­lio of work. I am nobody except that I use QuarkXPress and InDesign.

    If it was not me that alert­ed Quark’s PR depart­ment to the flaky arti­cle from Galina Arlov, it would have been some­one else. If you have a prob­lem with Quark pulling the sil­ly arti­cle from their news sec­tion, com­plain to Quark.

    (how­ev­er, I do feel hon­ored that you like my nudes)

  14. Tom K.

    Dudes, I think you have it all wrong. you guys have a web­site where you are com­plete­ly par­tial towards Adobe, there is no deny­ing that. There aren’t real­ly impar­tial judge­ments in your web­site. And this arti­cle is a bad attempt at crit­i­ciz­ing some­body else. I don’t find any­thing fas­ci­nat­ing in being called liars, fraud, etc. That sucks and gives you an infa­mous rep­u­ta­tion. Do you like that crap?

    The Adobe CS2 suite + InDesign runs sooo slow that I could ride a tur­tle and get any­where faster any­time I’m run­ning PS CS2+ Illustrator and ID at the same time. And if I’m using Extensis Suitcase, it takes for­ev­er and ever to open the CS2 suite. Sometimes I had to wait 5 min­utes for it to load, it’s frus­trat­ing like you can’t imag­ine. and please don’t try to sug­gest solu­tions, been there, done it all with the tech­ni­cians. It’s sim­ply the way it is with Adobe CS2 and that can­not be refut­ed no mat­ter what you say. I’m talk­ing a darn pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment, not the lone writer of letters-to-mom who only runs ID for fun.

    I have worked with Quark for many years (and ID) and Quark beats the hell out of ID when it comes to pro­duc­tion effi­cien­cy in our com­pa­ny, and ID is not the work­horse that Quark + appro­pri­ate Xtensions is, we tried it already. Now try con­vert­ing a Quark file to InDesign. and wel­come to hell, because you will have to con­vert ALL the files in your com­pa­ny to ID. 

    You know how much MONEY that costs???? can you pos­si­bly imag­ine how much it costs to con­vert all those files to ID?

    How many months of work are involved in mov­ing all of our thou­sands of quark files to ID, and being forced to redo every­thing because noth­ing will look or print right when con­vert­ing to ID??? you can’t even pos­si­ble fig­ure it out can you? Did your arti­cle con­sid­er at all the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges and the real TCO (total cost of own­er­ship) involved in mov­ing to ID? sheesh… you guys aren’t suf­fi­cient­ly edu­cat­ed to know what this means right? let me explain: It means that it costs a hell of a lot of mon­ey to con­vert to ID.

    I hate to see sites where peo­ple are obliv­i­ous to real­i­ty. That’s pret­ty stu­pid of you and I don’t think that you actu­al­ly have fig­ured out what it REALLY takes to switch. Here at our com­pa­ny we con­sid­ered to switch and after eval­u­at­ing the costs, we decid­ed there was no way in hell we were going to move to ID because it would have tak­en us beyond 1 year of work and hir­ing extra design­ers to con­vert and fix­ing our quark files that won’t sim­ply open right in ID. You are obvi­ous­ly igno­rant and blind to real­i­ty. You’re InDenial, that is evident.

    All of the peo­ple who I have ever met and who work with InDesign, say the same and that is that unless you have a killer sys­tem and a huge screen, Adobe CS2 eats all the sys­tem resources and slows you down like hell. The dude who wrote this arti­cle uses a DUAL PROCESSOR MACHINE (2 CPUs in his sys­tem board) for his “test”, he might do well in actu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing that alot of peo­ple use 256mb ram, 1.4 ghz or so proces­sors and CS2 won’t even run in those machines; in fact CS2 won’t even install unless you have more than 384mb ram, which means pret­ty much every­one needs to buy a new com­put­er. Go check it out, did you try installing CS2 in your com­put­ers yet?. 

    Furthermore, assum­ing that you had the $3k it costs to buy the com­put­er that runs CS2, (I HAD to buy a new g5 and a pret­ty large screen in order to run InDesign because all those tabs are a night­mare (and I’m not the only one say­ing it) to orga­nize on screen unless you have any­thing beyond 19″, and it cost­ed me $3195 includ­ing the war­ran­ty, that is just the com­put­er); MANY peo­ple have 15″ screens for work (par­tic­u­lar­ly those who work in lap­tops) and that in those screens, it takes dou­ble or triple the time to work with Indesign than it does with Quark, because it’s so cum­ber­some to find any­thing among the huge amount of InDesign palettes, that it takes for­ev­er to get any­thing done. You bet­ter have a very expen­sive com­put­er and a huge 21″ screen if you want to work with InDesign, or else you’re screwed. This is spe­cial­ly true with com­pa­nies, because who cares about the free­lancer who can­not afford those expen­sive com­put­ers? not you.

    And Jim (and the rest of you), don’t give me your crap that you know bet­ter because you don’t. You don’t work in any large cor­po­ra­tion and you don’t work any­where worth men­tion­ing, if you do, then tell where, what do you do, and pro­vide an email and phone where peo­ple can reach you, because I ain’t buy­ing it. You don’t know what is the real world either. If you want your com­ments to be con­sid­ered as remote­ly respon­si­ble, or if you are try­ing to make a name for your­self, then take respon­si­bil­i­ty and have the balls to take a stand and be will­ing to be account­able for what you say or else you are just a bullsh*tter, and noth­ing more.

    [Additional com­ments per­son­al­ly attack­ing anoth­er read­er removed. –Ed.]

  15. Alon

    Another long, ram­bling, sense­less post. Must be the same IP again.

  16. Tom K.

    [Commentary per­son­al­ly attack­ing anoth­er read­er removed. –Ed.]

  17. Jim Oblak

    Tom K, the rea­son no one has refut­ed your sense­less ram­bling is because it is, well, a sense­less rambling.

    If you are only run­ning 256 MB RAM, you are best off with Quark 4. Even Quark 6 shows slug­gish­ness on a sys­tem this old.

  18. Tom K.

    [Commentary per­son­al­ly attack­ing anoth­er read­er removed. –Ed.]

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