Quark: 'No Comment'

QvI In the next two ques­tions you asked about QuarkXPress 8, and then you jumped to QuarkXPress 9. What was that about? Did you get sat­is­fac­to­ry answers to all three questions?

PSB Not real­ly, no. The ques­tions were an oppor­tu­ni­ty for Schiavone to blow Quark’s horn and excite QuarkXPress users for the future. I don’t feel that he did that–other lay­out appli­ca­tions have been a sin­gle code base for going on 10 years, and, more impor­tant­ly, the mar­ket had already been told that XPress 7 was built as a uni­fied code base. The fact that XPress 8 will be one, inter­na­tion­al­ized prod­uct is not a new con­cept. Many QuarkXPress and QuarkXPress Passport users thought they’d have that in 7, so a promise to get it in 8 is like­ly to elic­it more of an “about time” recep­tion from cus­tomers than it will a “yahoo!” reaction.

I inquired about XPress 9 because it’s a crit­i­cal ques­tion to ask.

You see, in the soft­ware business–particularly with big, com­pli­cat­ed code base prod­ucts like any prod­uct from Quark, Adobe, Microsoft, and so forth–there are prod­uct roadmaps. Developers look at pro­posed fea­tures and iden­ti­fied bugs, and they eval­u­ate the amount of work involved to imple­ment any giv­en fea­ture or bug fix, the demand for the fea­ture or sever­i­ty of the bug, and how much time they have before devel­op­ment mile­stone and prod­uct release dead­lines. Then the devel­op­ers deter­mine whether a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture or bug fix can be imple­ment­ed in the next release, or if it has to wait until a lat­er version.

For exam­ple, say the QuarkXPress devel­op­ment team is look­ing at adding a new fea­ture to inter­face QuarkXPress with sys­tems at Starbucks via an always-on, bi-directional SSH con­nec­tion. In some future ver­sion of XPress, you’ll be able to choose your favorite Starbucks bev­er­age in the XPress pref­er­ences, and then click a but­ton on the new Deadline Tools palette to order that bev­er­age deliv­ered to you from the near­est Starbucks. Assuming that Starbucks has its infra­struc­ture in place and is ready to pro­ceed with the part­ner­ship, the ques­tion for XPress devel­op­ers is whether the have time to get the fea­ture into XPress 8. If not, they move it down the roadmap to XPress 9, 10, or lat­er, depend­ing on the amount of work, time, and need for the fea­ture. This is how most major soft­ware devel­op­ment works.

The rea­son I asked about XPress 9 was to get Schiavone on record say­ing that there is an XPress 9 on the roadmap. If he declined to answer that very straight­for­ward ques­tion, it would have giv­en rise to doubts about Quark’s com­mit­ment to the future of XPress–something I’m still not entire­ly sure about, at least, not in terms of XPress stay­ing a desk­top product.

QvI In the next sev­er­al ques­tions you seemed to be fol­low­ing two threads: enterprise-grade soft­ware and whether Schiavone has plans to take Quark, Inc. pub­lic or sell it. Let’s talk first about the enter­prise soft­ware ques­tions. You men­tioned Schiavone’s exten­sive and imme­di­ate­ly pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence with enterprise-grade prod­ucts from Arbortext, Inc. and General Electric Corp. sub­sidiaries, and; the fact that he tran­si­tioned Arbortext from a desk­top soft­ware com­pa­ny (like Quark) into an enter­prise sys­tems provider. What were you try­ing to draw out of Schiavone?

PSB Although most of the U.S., Canadian, and Japanese mar­kets have favored InDesign for sev­er­al ver­sions now, as does a large por­tion of design, pub­lish­ing, and pro­duc­tion in the U.K., QuarkXPress con­tin­ues to be very pop­u­lar through­out Europe, South America, and Africa. InDesign is favored on free­lance and small busi­ness desk­tops on those con­ti­nents, but QuarkXPress still owns the major­i­ty of large pub­lish­ing and pro­duc­tion work­flows. Australia is a hot bat­tle­field. Adobe’s Creative Suite, which includes InDesign, sells well Down Under, but Quark is wag­ing a suc­cess­ful counter offen­sive by sat­u­rat­ing the edu­ca­tion­al mar­ket through a strate­gic part­ner­ship with Scholastic.

No mat­ter where you look, though, the writ­ing is on the wall: Quark is steadi­ly los­ing desk­tops to InDesign. And, it isn’t just fight­ing for the desk­top anymore.

Server and work­flow prod­ucts that incor­po­rate or run atop XPress are anti­quat­ed and have been lag­ging behind chang­ing pub­lish­ing needs around the globe. Quark’s own enterprise- and server-grade prod­ucts, as well as third-party part­ner sys­tems, are los­ing to InDesign-based work­flow sys­tems like SoftCare’s K4 and K2. When Adobe com­pletes InDesign’s trans­for­ma­tion into a ful­ly scal­able, FrameMaker-like SGML pub­lish­ing plat­form, InDesign will become a jug­ger­naut Quark may nev­er be able to turn.

I believe Ray Schiavone’s plan is to use the greater agili­ty inher­ent in Quark’s small­er size to head off Adobe’s dom­i­na­tion of enter­prise pub­lish­ing. No, I don’t believe that Schiavone intends to take Quark down the same road he steered Arbortext, mov­ing ful­ly out of desk­top and into enter­prise. Eventually, yes, but not today. On the con­trary, I think Schiavone cares a great deal about desk­tops at this cru­cial stage in the game. He needs them. The desk­top is his gate­way to the enter­prise, and, just like Microsoft and Adobe before him, he needs desk­top soft­ware to sell and lever­age his new enter­prise products.

I think QuarkXPress will con­tin­ue to have util­i­ty on its own, but its pri­ma­ry role will be to func­tion as a desk­top client for an as-yet unre­vealed enterprise-grade suite of systems.

XPress 8 will be the first stage, I pre­dict. It will have few new fea­tures design­ers real­ly want, but will offer greater scal­a­bil­i­ty and automa­tion impor­tant to man­agers of large pub­lish­ing work­flows. It, and Quark CopyDesk 8, will offer tight inte­gra­tion with XPress Server and new enter­prise sys­tems Quark will announce over the course of the next two years. Although Quark will hope to see their new sys­tems adopted–and will pro­mote those adop­tions at least as loud­ly as Adobe touts migra­tions to K4–Schiavone knows that major pub­lish­ing work­flows don’t change rapid­ly. His real­is­tic goal for the XPress 8 gen­er­a­tion of prod­ucts will be to make the mar­ket take notice of Quark again, to open a dia­log with large work­flow man­agers who will help refine Schiavone’s vision for XPress 9.

By the time XPress 9 and its match­ing sys­tems do release (prob­a­bly less than 12 months fol­low­ing the release of ver­sion 8), QuarkXPress will be lit­tle more than a client appli­ca­tion. All the real pow­er will reside on the server-side sys­tems. More impor­tant­ly, by aban­don­ing the so-called “fea­ture war” with InDesign, Quark will cre­ate a lop­sided conun­drum for poten­tial users–you can have near total automa­tion of your pub­lish­ing and pro­duc­tion, with out­put to print, PDF, PDF/X, HTML, XML, and every­thing else you can think of, but with­out cer­tain cre­ativ­i­ty, com­po­si­tion, and proof­ing fea­tures the com­pe­ti­tion will have had for generations.

Ultimately, I believe the aver­age small-office, home-office user of desk­top pub­lish­ing sys­tems will com­plete­ly for­get about Quark before QuarkXPress 10 because Schiavone only cares about small and medi­um sized busi­ness­es now; once they’ve ful­filled their pur­pose as step­ping stones to enter­prise, Quark will have no fur­ther use for them.

I also think QuarkXPress 10 won’t be desk­top soft­ware at all. It will be a server-hosted, instance appli­ca­tion, which isn’t fea­si­ble for SOHO and small stu­dios. Similar to the way QuarkXPress License Server func­tions today, com­pa­nies will pur­chase blocks of licens­es. But, instead of installing the XPress soft­ware on users’ sys­tems and let­ting the License Server man­age the num­ber of con­cur­rent­ly run­ning copies, users will log into their work­flow sys­tems and use a copy of the QuarkXPress client that actu­al­ly runs on the appli­ca­tion serv­er rather than their local com­put­ers. The change from desk­top to server-hosted, I believe, will begin in earnest with XPress 9, which will have a desk­top instal­lable as an aid to assist Quark cus­tomers in tran­si­tion­ing to the new server-based soft­ware. Beginning with XPress 10–or 11, if the out­cry is great enough–the indi­vid­ual instal­la­tion ver­sion will be removed. Companies that can’t afford the hard­ware required to run such a set­up will be unable to use XPress.

After 2012, I don’t think Quark will care too much about desk­top users because it won’t offer prod­ucts to them.

QvI And, to your ques­tions about tak­ing Quark pub­lic or sell­ing it?

PSB That’s easy: I think the Ebrahimi fam­i­ly, who cur­rent­ly own Quark, lock, stock, and bar­rel, want out. I’ve sus­pect­ed that for a long time now. I must say, though, that I always thought they’d sim­ply sell the com­pa­ny. I did­n’t think they’d look for an IPO–and I do believe that’s what’s going on.

Twice Schiavone made it a point to inti­mate that the com­pa­ny may go pub­lic dur­ing my tele­phone inter­view with him. He was very care­ful to word every­thing else exact­ly the way he want­ed to say it, so I have to believe that he intend­ed to con­vey to me that his goal is to take the privately-owned Quark, Inc. to the stock mar­ket. And, it makes a great deal of sense.

By the end of his direct involve­ment with Quark, Fred Ebrahimi was no fan of QuarkXPress cus­tomers any­way, and the rest of the Ebrahimi fam­i­ly has also report­ed­ly gone hands-off of the com­pa­ny. They want out of man­ag­ing Quark, and they can do that–while still earn­ing income from it–by open­ing the com­pa­ny to oth­er investors. In fact, I’d be sur­prised if Schiavone was­n’t already giv­en a per­cent­age of own­er­ship. If the Ebrahimi fam­i­ly wants out entire­ly, then the way to cash out with the biggest pay­off is after a strong ini­tial pub­lic offering.

Mark my words: Simultaneous to the real (not ini­tial) enter­prise prod­uct offer­ings (prob­a­bly short­ly after XPress 8 ships or around the time 9 is released), Schiavone is going to lead Quark into an IPO.

There you have it. The best inter­view answers Ray Schiavone can muster after near­ly a month with the ques­tions, and the back­sto­ry behind the ques­tions. I expect­ed more from the com­pa­ny that says it isn’t the same old Quark, with the same old arrogance.

If all the “no com­ment” respons­es are any indi­ca­tion, I’m appar­ent­ly once again frozen out of offi­cial chan­nels at Quark. That means I’m back to get­ting all my infor­ma­tion about Quark from oth­er sources–talkative employ­ees, ven­dors, and part­ners, leaked mem­o­ran­dum, unwit­ting offi­cial admis­sions and omis­sions, deduc­tive reasoning–you know, all the same sources that have enabled me to report, ana­lyze, and pre­dict the activ­i­ties of Quark for 5 years now while Schiavone’s and Guthrie’s pre­de­ces­sors con­sid­ered me per­sona non grata.

I’m bro­ken up about it. Really.