A discussion about the software industry and their coders

I am holding off upgrading to an Intel Mac in order to keep using Adobe products while they get their merger act together. I have had too many unpleasant experiences with Quark's customer hostile indifference toward its customers to get suckered into sinking more money into XPress, especially this rather hasty upgrade. I am also annoyed at Quark for buying out ALAP just to be able to dump some very good competetive products that I use, InBooklet for one. Might be shrewd business, but contrary to what Ebrahimi may have declared, the move has absolutely nothing to do with customers. Quark has never really understood that customers make a market, one by one, and not the other way around. If you treat customers dismissively, the market will vanish like a spooked school of fish. Bottom line: I don't trust Quark.

I hear you Don! Quark has had a long history of bad customer responsiveness. I think it was flowing from Quark being a privately held company and being micromanaged by the owner -- in more than one way.
Quark thus was a reflection of the ego of the owner. Bigger than the customer. I mean the price of US $ 999 for XPress 4.0 was ridiculous. When Adobe InDesign started staying at 699 Quark has come down to 749! Curiously though Passport sells at $1499.
Now compare that with the Price at which you can buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite with Macromedia Studio for $1899. Quark is even now not very customer friendly.
Seems the lesson of past is not learnt.
That said, the situation is sad. They have a good product but bad management. I worked with Quark in 1999-2000 so wish things were different!

ujwal tickoo:

When Adobe InDesign started staying at 699 Quark has come down to 749! Curiously though Passport sells at $1499.

I find it curious that Quark sells a passport version of XPress at all.

With Adobe's products offering multilingual publishing at no extra cost in many (but not all-Arab, for instance), the insistence of Quark insisiting on a premium when Adobe offers it for nothing has, I understand, been a big selling point for InD at the expense of Quark, and Adobe has been doing well with it for a few years now.

One wonders why Quark insists on doing things that way.

Samuel,
I agree with you InDesign is by design a multilingual product. Passport versioning is a historic practice at Quark and has kept me wondering about its continuation.
In 1999 when I worked at Quark, Fred Ebrahimi and the management used to state that Passport took more work and money for development so it was fair to charge a higher amount. Also, at one point QuarkXPress US version would sell only in the US -- without a dongle -- and Passport with a dongle in international markets. The assumption was that piracy in US was less than that in International markets.
Well now Activation has taken place of dongles to check piracy. So why continue with Passport?
Lets keep guessing Samuel! :)
Btw: Do you think XPress 7 will help Quark v/s Adobe?

Ujwal:

Do you think XPress 7 will help Quark v/s Adobe?

Well, here's my opinion:

It pretty much brought Xpreess even with Indy. I've been reading a lot of buzz, and the overall reaction is mixed; Quarksters love it, of course, and it is a valuable improvement to the program.

Composition zones are a good idea, and give XPress a certain InCopy-like functionality. You can now synchronize images as well as text; that's good. Display rendering is quite improved. Job Jackets are a good idea, but as Galen Gruman observed, not intuitively implemented (and having played around with the public betas, I'd have to agree).

While the interface has improved, it still looks like the Xpress of the past,only polished up. This may be my own hobby-horse, but I think it would behoove Quark to slick up that interface a bit. Adobe's looks slicker than ever, and they've still been able to keep it familiar. Quark's still feels like you're back in 4, save for the layout spaces. Notably, the changes to the Measurement palette bring nearly every function into a palette of some sort-which is, when you think about it a moment, kind of like InDesign, really.

Bottom line, while Xpress 7 does a few things better than Indy CS2, it's at best pulled abreast in functionality, and even though XPress 7 will be in Universal Binary format right away, Adobe's apps will almost certainly be with the relase of CS3, due in one year's time, so that advantage will be gone, and I think it not amiss to say that CS3 has a chance to be as far ahead of CS1 as XPress 6.5 was from 4.

The very next morning after Quark debuted Xpress 7 they should have gone right back into the lab and gotten started on XPress 8. If they didn't, at least to me, CS3 might make Xpress 7 look like Xpress 4...again.