Put Up or Shut Up

Suspiciously propagandic reader comments proclaim XPress 7.0 'will change how the publishing industry works,' but won't qualify their radical statements.

“XPress 7.0 will blow Adobe’s Indesign out of the mar­ket,” exclaims Janes Mann in a com­ment to our sto­ry “Quark’s Postcards From the Edge”.

On the same sto­ry Dean Jones says: “By august this year, u guys will again be shift­ing back [from InDesign to QuarkXPress].” In clos­ing he adds, “CS2 cant even think of com­pet­ing with XPress 7.0.”

Even more bold­ly, Mann returns to pre­dict the fol­low­ing in his com­ment to our short news post about a recent Quark, Inc. sweep­stakes: “XPress 7.0 [will] change the way [the] pub­lish­ing indus­try works. After 7.0 there will be no [com­pe­ti­tion].”

Nearly word for word, this com­ment on our “Top 10 New InDesign CS2 Features” sto­ry, John Mathew echoes Mann: “I had a pre­view of pre-release XPress 7.0 & i am sure it will blow Indesign to pieces. I sup­pose XPress 7.0 will change the way [the pub­lish­ing] indus­try works.”

“Bill” announces in the same thread that “[QuarkXPress] 7.0 is going to be a big bang. Start of a new era. Competition [would be] com­plete­ly erased.”

While their exu­ber­ance for the as-yet unan­nounced and unpre­viewed QuarkXPress 7.0, ten­ta­tive­ly sched­uled for release this sum­mer, unites Mann, Jones, Mathew, and Bill, they share oth­er commonalities.

First, they all have Yahoo​.com e‑mail adress­es and none appear in the Yahoo​.com mem­ber direc­to­ry. Moreover, with the excep­tion of Jones, their @yahoo.com e‑mail address­es all fit the pat­tern of so-called throw­away addresses–that is, they include some com­bi­na­tion of com­mon name and numbers.

Second, Mann, Bill, and Mathew all speak of hav­ing recent­ly seen a pre-release of QuarkXPress 7.0. All began com­ment­ing on Quark VS InDesign​.com imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing Adobe’s announce­ment, and our cov­er­age, of InDesign CS2; none of the above gen­tle­men have com­ment­ed on this site pri­or to that date.

Finally, and most sus­pi­cious of all, all four men have IP address­es that place them in Australia. In fact, Mathew and Mann have the exact same IP address. As does Robert Louse and some­one iden­ti­fied as Charu Chandra Tiwari, who post­ed the only pre-CS2 announce­ment com­ment, an equal­ly vague pro­mo­tion of Quark on 30 May 2004.

In response to each of these com­ments, either our own Samuel John Klein, oth­er read­ers, or I have asked for qual­i­fi­ca­tion of such bold state­ments by Mann, Bill, Mathew, and Jones. How, we have asked, will XPress 7.0 “change the way the pub­lish­ing indus­try works”? What is this “new era” com­ing this sum­mer? What fea­tures will XPress 7.0 have that will “blow InDesign to pieces” or erase the competition?

Specifically respond­ing to Jones’s pro­mo­tion of XPress 7.0’s uni­code and OpenType sup­port Klein notes: “The glimpse at the inter­face [pub­lished in X‑Ray Magazine vol. 3, no. 1] is intrigu­ing, and the promised trans­paren­cy will be a great boon to Quarkers, but lit­tle (if any) of this func­tion­al­i­ty isn’t avail­able in InDesign. So far, Quark seems to be going for fea­ture parity.”

Neither Jones nor any­one else stepped up to answer Klein’s chal­lenge or the points he goes on to raise about spe­cif­ic features.

In pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence I have received sim­i­lar state­ments from devel­op­ers of XPress xten­sions, but only from those devel­op­ers who do not also build plug-ins for InDesign or oth­er Adobe prod­ucts. Because their mes­sages were pri­vate, I shall not divulge the iden­ti­ties of the devel­op­ers, but their asser­tions of what XPress 7.0 will mean to the mar­ket or to the com­pe­ti­tion with InDesign have been large­ly iden­ti­cal to the indi­vid­u­als’ above–in some cas­es ver­ba­tim. Each of these xten­sions devel­op­ers has urged me to ensure that Quark VS InDesign​.com reports on the fact that XPress 7.0 blows away InDesign; to each I respond­ed with a promiste that Quark VS InDesign​.com will report objec­tive­ly on the fea­tures of the next release of XPress, as we have always done.

While Quark VS InDesign​.com, and I in par­tic­u­lar, have been crit­i­cal of Quark in the past, that crit­i­cism has always been direct­ed at the oper­a­tion of the com­pa­ny and spe­cif­ic state­ments made by its for­mer CEO, Fred Ebrahimi. With his replace­ment of Ebrahimi as CEO, Kamar Aulakh almost instant­ly trans­formed Quark, Inc. into a very dif­fer­ent enter­prise, with a rad­i­cal­ly friend­lier atti­tude toward cus­tomers and part­ners. With the release of XPress 6.5 and QuarkVista, cer­tain XPress fea­tures did indeed jump ahead of InDesign CS, which I stat­ed in my December 2004 review of the PSD Import Xtensions and which Klein inti­mat­ed in his January 2005 review of QuarkVista. Quark VS InDesign​.com reports objec­tive­ly on the prod­ucts and actions of both Quark and Adobe; we have no inten­tion of chang­ing that mis­sion when we see QuarkXPress 7.0.

When Quark offi­cial­ly announces XPress 7.0, Quark VS InDesign​.com will cov­er that news and report on its announced fea­ture set as we did InDesign CS2. When Quark pro­vides us with a copy of XPress 7.0 for review, we shall eval­u­ate it fair­ly in head-to-head com­par­i­son with InDesign CS2. At that time, read­ers will have our objec­tive, unbi­ased opin­ion of how the reput­ed­ly ground-breaking XPress 7.0 stacks up against its com­pe­ti­tion. Additionally, we hope Quark will fol­low the lead of its indus­try peers and pro­vide fully-functional tri­al copies of XPress 7.0 so pub­lish­ing and pro­duc­tion pro­fes­sion­als may down­load it and InDesign CS2 to com­pare for them­selves, eval­u­at­ing the func­tion and val­ue of both appli­ca­tions to spe­cif­ic workflows.

Until such time as we actu­al­ly see XPress 7.0 in action, the asser­tions of indi­vid­u­als like Mann, Jones, Bill, and Mathew amount to noth­ing more than a pro­pa­gan­da ini­tia­tive that comes dan­ger­ous­ly close to qual­i­fy­ing as com­ment spam.

To these gen­tle­men I say: Put up or shut up. Answer the ques­tions that have been posed to you, quan­ti­fy your rad­i­cal state­ments, or keep them to yourself.

To Quark, Inc., whose Denver, London, and Indian offices read Quark VS InDesign​.com dai­ly, I offer you the chance to con­vince the Quark VS InDesign​.com staff of the mer­its of XPress 7.0. We have seen InDesign CS2, and we are impressed. Now impress us with your appli­ca­tion. Show us that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary state­ments made by XPress sup­port­ers are true, and we will shout about it from the rooftops.