Desktop wars – the battle between Quark and InDesign

Desktop publishing changes everything. It decimates lines of demarcation between established trades, practically eliminating typesetters, making compositors into page designers, layout artists into prepress operators and almost everyone who writes into proto-publishers. It foreshortens the print production process in a manner unbelievable only a few short years ago and in the process has sparked a fiercely contested battle for the hearts, minds and skill sets of a generation of layout professionals.

In the professional publishing space the tussle was a non-event for many years as QuarkXPress effortlessly dominated as the program of choice. It provided a far superior offering in terms of ease of use, stability and output than any of its competitors. For the desktop generation that entered the workforce in the 1990s the sheer ubiquity of the program, its relatively slow evolution through upgrades and the expertise gained through years of constant use ensured that it engendered a loyal army of followers prepared to swear by it as the best layout program around. Company estimates have over four million QuarkXPress users worldwide. Being able to use the program is a passport to job mobility throughout the publishing and graphic arts industry. Everyone is looking for good layout operators and every good professional is proficient in XPress.

A serious threat appears on the horizon

But the times are a-changing and for the first time in years there is a sense that Quark may be under a serious threat from arch rival Adobe. InDesign was unabashedly created to take on XPress, and through a combination of rapid upgrades, feature development and an aggressive marketing campaign, it now poses a significant threat to Quark. The battle is intensifying as the industry moves up in operating systems, especially to Mac OSX, but also Windows X. To take advantage of the new operating systems people have to upgrade their layout programs, and while they may have so far proved reluctant to shell out the money, the snowball is picking up pace and the race is now on in earnest between Quark and Adobe.

It wasn’t always so.

Ironically the first workable desktop page layout program came from neither company, but from an obscure Seattle inventor Paul Brainerd, whose company Aldus brought PageMaker to the market in 1985. Originally designed for the Mac it was the first PostScript-based desktop layout program and after its initial success it was snapped up by Adobe in 1994. Arguably the acquisition of PageMaker distracted Adobe from the main game for many years as it tried to re-engineer the software to compete in the professional publishing market. Due to some fundamental design attributes it was never going to work and while PageMaker is still in existence, now in version 8, it is confined to the office and home market where it competes with a plethora of low-end simple-to-use layout programs. Its failure left Adobe without a credible professional layout program for many crucial years.

Around the late 1980s, other layout programs were also making their bid for the big time, notably Ventura, which was the layout program chosen by Australian Consolidated Press when it created the largest desktop publishing computer network in the southern hemisphere. Residing on the DOS operating system, it was an industrial strength layout system with little of the flexibility that was DTP’s main strength. The software was bought by Xerox and latterly by Corel, which rebadged it as Corel Ventura. It is now up to version 10 and trades on its strengths as a long document layout program, rivalling FrameMaker from Adobe.

Quark captures the professional market

It was left to Quark to make the running in 1987 with the first release of XPress, aimed squarely at the professional publishing market. The initial offering was out in front of the rest in terms of precision typography, layout, and colour control at the desktop. In its space it did not have any real competition and the pace of the upgrades tells the story of a product that, once it became established, was in no hurry to push the boundaries. In the first 15 years of its life there were only two new versions, QuarkXPress 3.1 in 1992 and 4.0 in 1997. This while the rest of the industry was in a positive lather of versions and upgrades.

It was the arrival of the Unix-based Mac OSX in 2002 that forced Quark into what proved to be its first strategic blunder, the rushed release of QuarkXPress 5, a version that even the company itself admits was deeply flawed. The company claims it brought the program to market early to meet the demands of its installed base, yet it is clear that there was no ongoing development keeping pace with the movement in the industry. It was this complacency, some call it arrogance that has left Quark vulnerable to the Adobe invasion.

Under the private ownership of the reclusive Fred Ebrahimi Quark has proved a river of gold for the Denver-based entrepreneur. His company has always priced its program at the top end of the market, confident in the reputation and abilities of its product. While it may have done deals with large users, over the years it gained a reputation of being a hard company to deal with if you were seeking a deal for three or four copies of the program. Upgrades were almost the price of a new program. Trainers got little or no support and to talk to channel distributors is to hear a tale of ongoing tough negotiations for everything.

Let the battle commence

This was the situation when Adobe seriously re-entered the professional desktop layout space with InDesign, in 1999. Conceived as a ’Quark killer’, it grew out of Adobe’s frustration of not being able to capitalize on its dominance in the ‘art’ programs for the desktop – PhotoShop and Illustrator. These programs had the same level of market share in the design sector as QuarkXPress has in layout, yet when the graphics professionals imported their artwork onto the page Adobe had nothing to offer.

The early version of InDesign offered little encouragement to anyone hoping for a viable alternative. Clunky and littered with glitches it has difficulty making headway. It was not until 2002, the year of the fated QuarkXPress 5 that InDesign began to make inroads. In that year it outsold its rival, a situation the company maintains is still the case.

InDesign has since ironed out its bugs, by and large, ( in effect we are now up to Version 3.0) and has evolved into a layout program as stable and productive as XPress. Because of its common parentage with PhotoShop, Illustrator and PhotoShop it also has a quite a number of advantageous features, not least being the ability to switch seamlessly back and forth between the programs. It can also deal in generic formats such as PhotoShop’s PSD, preserving transparencies in the layout, eliminating in one fell swoop the time-honoured exasperation of deep etching.

Capture the big users first the rest will follow

As a marketing strategy Adobe went after the large magazine publishing companies such as ACP and Pacific Publications, making them offers that were hard to refuse. The strategy was that if the publishing companies made the switch to InDesign then all the freelancers supplying them would be encouraged to follow suit. Most of the large publishers were happy to take advantage of the offers and reports have them very satisfied with the move.

Whether the strategy had much effect is a moot point, largely because of the success of Adobe’s own PDF, which has become the industry’s file transfer format. As the industry moved to PDF, Quark had to face the reality that much of its page output, in addition to its graphics input, were in formats devised, and to a great extent controlled, by its rival. It found itself in the position of encirclement by Adobe, which made its own strategy plain with the release of InDesign Creative Suite (CS) last year.

Is InDesign CS a ‘Quark killer’?

The most notable feature of the bundling into one CS package of InDesign, PhotoShop, Illustrator and Acrobat – Adobe’s crown jewels – is its price. Addressed at everyone making the move up to OSX, you can get the whole package for $2300, or as an upgrade for any of the programs for $1600. It takes the matter of cost out of the equation, especially when you remember that Quark, essentially a one-program company, is maintaining its salad days pricing of $2600.

Certainly there will be no contest for anyone entering the industry, or setting up shop him or herself. By simply purchasing the essential PhotoShop and Illustrator in the CS bundle they get InDesign for less than the price of a standalone copy of XPress – after which they would have to go out and buy the graphics programs anyway.

Reports of its demise are exaggerated
But it would be unwise to write off QuarkXPress. Version 6.0, which came rapidly on the heels of the disastrous 5.0 in 2003, made up a lot of lost ground and while critics may accuse it of being overly focused on web design it does have the ability to output direct PDF. And according to Daevid Richards of Modulo, the Quark channel in Australia, while XPress user may have shied away from upgrading to 5.0, they are embracing the latest version. He maintains the company is ahead of its budget this year in terms of units sold.

He doesn’t see any long-term threats to the large installed base of Quark from InDesign, which he claims still has a lot of stability issues. Conscious of the price disparity he is happy to overlook the budget conscious one or two program design shops in favour of concentrating on the larger sites where he is confident there will be no change. Beside he believes that Adobe cannot, and will not, continue with its pricing structure. Certainly there can be little profit margin in its current terms, which must be considered as a market share strategy.

In the next 18 months almost everyone in the publishing and graphic design business is going to have to bite the bullet and move up to OSX. You can only use the classic version of QuarkXPress 4.0 and InDesign 2 for so long. Eventually it will come time to make a decision. If you are a printer then you may be able to convince your customers to move entirely to PDF. (Although you are more than likely resigned to buying the programs your customers use.)

If you run a large layout or prepress department in a publishing house or agency your decision is tougher. With XPress you know what you are getting, and your people are skilled on the program eliminating training. But the price!

There is no doubt that the huge installed base of QuarkXPress will take years to erode, but it is equally as certain that with InDesign CS the erosion process has begun.

What do you think? Would you switch from QuarkXPress to InDesign?

Come back to me: Comment@print21.com.au