Quark CEO Spills the Beans

In an interview with the International Journal of Newspaper Technology Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh spills the beans about new Quark products, new business unit Quark Commerce, and new product solutions for classified and ad production and booking, issue, and page planning.

“

N&T: With Quark QPS Classic and Enterprise, Quark has a DMS solu­tion in the indus­try. Would it sur­prise you at all to see Adobe at some point come out with a dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment solu­tion, see­ing as how their oth­er prod­ucts cov­er a wide range in the pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment? Do you feel you could com­pete if they did?

Aulakh: There are two answers to your ques­tion. One, I would say yes, it wouldn’t sur­prise me, but the only rea­son I would say that is because they’ve always fol­lowed us. Look at their his­to­ry: We announce some­thing XML, and the very next quar­ter, they go announce some­thing XML. 

We have the DMS Server, they come out with an InDesign Server. But the prob­a­bil­i­ty is that it’s not going to hap­pen any­time soon, because this is not some­thing that hap­pens overnight. For a desk­top com­pa­ny that spe­cial­izes in desk­top prod­ucts, to devel­op the engi­neer­ing where­with­al, to devel­op enter­prise prod­ucts, (that) takes a few years. I’ve been through it. That’s why I know what’s involved. 

What they (Adobe) have been try­ing to do is part­ner with oth­ers in that area and devel­op solu­tions through part­ner­ships, but that’s not been work­ing out too well for them. 

If they’re going to go this route, soon­er or lat­er they’re going to have to engi­neer or re-engineer their teams to start think­ing enter­prise, build­ing enterprise. 

”

The inter­view is avail­able in both online print and audio form. 

1 thought on “Quark CEO Spills the Beans”

  1. software-robotics

    Oh broth­er, I am so tired of the whin­ing adobe gib­ber­ish about Quarks sup­port etc. blah blah blah. I am a Quark Xpress Xtension devel­op­er and also an Adobe InDesign and Acrobat Plug-Ins devel­op­er. Of all the peo­ple I have worked with over the years sup­port­ing hun­dreds and hun­dreds of users, who ever real­ly needs to call Quark or Adobe for any sup­port. Ever hear of (RTFM), acronym for Read The F#&$ing Manual. Or go to Quark’s user to user help forum.

    This is so tired, and so is all this Adobe is Quark Killer BS. The only things good about InDesign were bought from Aldus, or copied from a QuarkXPress (inno­va­tion). I mean hell Quark had auto­mat­ic trap­ping tables in a lay­out appli­ca­tion like 12 or 15 years ago. InDesign is OK, and I am cool that folks can use whater they want, like my PDF-X-Robot runs with both an Quark Xtension AND an Adobe Plug-In with one license. Freedom of choice, it’s fine. But to bash a total­ly sol­id indus­try stan­dard appli­ca­tion like Quark is retarded. 

    As a long time pre­press man­ag­er, soft­ware devel­op­er, and expert train­er, I say both are OK. Anybody though that says Quark sucks just shows their own lack of tech­ni­cal skill to oper­ate the appli­ca­tions at hand. Anyone want free help with Quark Xpress or Adobe come to our site and get all the help you want from a very expert user group. A place where both InDesign AND Quark users are respected.

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