Quark Starting To Care?

In a com­ment on my post “I Shout ‘Quark Sucks!’ Loudest” Alan men­tioned this sur­vey. Apparently Quark, Inc. has final­ly tak­en its fists from over its ears and decid­ed to ask cus­tomers what they think.

With ques­tions like, “Please give Quark an over­all rat­ing for per­for­mance in… Customer Service and Product val­ue com­pared to price” and “In what area do you think Quark most needs to improve,” it would appear old Fred Ebrahimi is final­ly feel­ing the pres­sure of Adobe’s com­pe­ti­tion. He could­n’t care less about Quark’s cus­tomers, so the only rea­son he would solic­it cus­tomer feed­back is because he knows he has­n’t a choice. Quark’s death bells have been chim­ing for some time–the entire indus­try knows that–but Ebrahimi has had his fists jammed into his ears while he chant­ed “la lalalala” at the top of his lungs. He must have final­ly heard the bells. He’s final­ly admit­ted that he knows Adobe and InDesign are going to kill his lit­tle one-application company.

So now he wants feed­back from the cus­tomers, pre­sum­ably as a pre­cur­sor to mak­ing pos­i­tive changes in the way Quark deals with its customers.

So, the real ques­tion is: Is it too lit­tle too late?

Take the sur­vey. Tell Quark what you real­ly think of it. In the com­ments area, feel free to tell Fred Ebrahimi Quark Sucks, and that I sent you.

Quark: Quark Survey

5 thoughts on “Quark Starting To Care?”

  1. Pariah Burke

    Addendum: I thought I’d share the com­ments I left on Quark’s sur­vey. In addi­tion to hon­est­ly anser­ing their multiple-choice questions–some were favorable–I left this in the com­ments section:

    “Trying to squeeze every lit­tle pen­ny out of customers–reference the $50 man­u­al, the lack of sales incen­tives in Europe, the out­ra­geous “new ver­sion” price for minor revi­sions with new whole numbers–is not the way to build brand loyalty.
    Quark used to be a good prod­uct and a decent com­pa­ny. Unfortunately, I think you got cocky. When you made that auda­cious jab at Adobe by offer­ing to buy it, you made a real ene­my in Adobe. InDesign is Adobe’s revenge. After alien­at­ing its user base and killing any good will that might have car­ried you, may don’t think Quark, Inc. will sur­vive beyond the next three years.
    Top lay­out appli­ca­tion for over a decade. You had a good run. Good bye.”
  2. Pariah Burke

    More com­ments on page two:

    “LISTEN to your cus­tomers. This sur­vey is a good first step, but you real­ly should read and lis­ten to what your users have to say. The specifics are impor­tant, because most of the mar­ket knows you don’t lis­ten to them. Fewer think you’ll be around much longer.”
  3. Pariah Burke

    LOL Quark will nev­er read the above com­ments. The fourth and final sec­tion of the sur­vey is bro­ken. The entire sur­vey gets tossed if the sub­mit but­ton on the fourth page isn’t pressed. The fourth page won’t load because Quark mis­pro­grammed its Cold Fusion form.

    Beautiful!

    Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks! Quark Sucks!

  4. Tuttle

    I admin an ad agency with about 40 seats. We’ve only upgrad­ed a cou­ple to Quark 5 and one to 6 (prod­uct acti­va­tion brings Quark to a whole new lev­el of sup­port suck­i­tude) in favor of mov­ing our users to Adobe’s CS suite. I’ve been receiv­ing tons of email and a few calls from Quark vir­tu­al­ly BEGGING me to upgrade our old 4 instal­la­tions. They’ll give me a 5->6 upgrade for $99! They’re always kind of stunned when I tell them that’s still $99 too much.

    And hav­ing just this moment fin­ished wast­ing an hour of my time sal­vaging a cor­rupt Quark doc­u­ment with Markztools and sweat; I must say I’ll be damned before I encour­age fur­ther use of that piece of junk on any machines I have to support.

    Anybody EVER have to sal­vage an ID file?

  5. Pariah Burke

    Tuttle:

    I’m sor­ry to hear about your Quark woes. Thanks for shar­ing them, but I’m sor­ry you expe­ri­enced them.

    Welcome to Quark Disappreciation Society, Brother Tuttle. All chant: “Quark Sucks!”

    The good news is that, with an agency the size of yours, you should com­mand enough respect from your print (etc.) ven­dors that switch­ing to InDesign won’t cause you the ven­dor push-back many of the small­er agen­cies and free­lancers have experienced.

    Salvaging an InDesign file… Actually, occas­sion­al­ly InD files do get cor­rupt­ed if the appli­ca­tion crash­es. Not with the fre­quen­cy and almost pre­dictabil­i­ty of Quark, but it does hap­pen once in a great while. However, it’s no big deal. InD auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ates mini-backups of the last work­ing doc while you’re work­ing on it. All you have to do is restore the back­up to return to a ful­ly func­tion­al, up-to-date .INDD file. InD cre­ates mini-saves while you’re work­ing on the file every one minute (but deletes them when you hit save). See this Adobe Tech arti­cle.

    The only oth­er prob­lem with cor­rupt doc­u­ments of which I’m aware is pos­si­ble cor­rup­tion when sav­ing across a net­work or to remov­able media (rather than the local hard­drive). The issue isn’t unique to InD, but it seemed for a while to get the most atten­tion with InD (maybe because so many peo­ple were used to Quark rou­tine­ly foul­ing its own files). If you ever need it, you’ll find info on that par­tic­u­lar issue here.

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