So Quark's decided that what it really needs to do to stop mass migration from its software to InDesign is (flurry of trumpets) rebrand itself! Can you hear that thumping sound? That's my head hitting my desk repeatedly. It's quite painful doing that, actually, so I'll stop.
That's right, the root of all anti-Quark feeling isn't, as previously suspected, its “My God! You want how much for it? I could get InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and a small yacht for that price tag”. It isn't the useless customer service. It isn't even the meandering, featureless upgrade path Quark has had post version 3.3.
It was the unfriendly logo.
If Quark were really serious about fixing its death spiral, here's what it would do
- Cut the price. £800 or so is ridiculous. What's QuarkXPress actually worth? £300 tops. If Quark says otherwise, my spirited rejoinder is “InDesign, InDesign, InDesign”. Yes, you can buy three InDesigns for the price of one Quark. If I were an IT manager again, I wouldn't be thinking too hard about that one
- Put features that everyone actually needs into each release. Version 4 useful feature: bad vector paths and character style sheets; version 5 useful feature: contextual menus that conflict with existing shortcuts; version 6 useful feature: OS X compatibility, decent PDFing. £200 a time and only version 6 was worth it. I have yet to find a designer of any note that does any of their illustration and graphics work in Quark rather than in Photoshop or Illustrator or who uses Quark's supposedly exciting illustration features at all. Virtually every new feature introduced between version 3.3 and 6 was pretty much a waste of time.
- Stop ignoring small and overseas companies in favour of large US companies. The features planned for version 7 are not exactly going to set the world on fire for small publishers. Ooh, XML again! Show me even one small publishing company that claims to use XML and I'll show you its EU grant application form and the faked corroborative paperwork.
- Remember that many Quark users aren't designers. How about a halfway decent spellchecking system or even something like Word's grammar checker? Some way to export text and images into a Word document? These kinds of things are useful to small companies that have editorial staff using Quark, rather than designers.
- Drop the price of Quark Copy Desk. No one can afford it.
- Add the following: The ability to use any font wherever it is without resorting to FontReserve, Suitcase, etc; decent preflighting; an image standardiser and corruption checker; Photoshop integration or some kind of equivalent image tool; and an image library.
- Get rid of that stupid licence checker. It's annoying, not a piracy preventer.
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