About Quark Publishing SoftwareQuark, Inc. is a private owned software company founded 1981 as "Quark Engineering" in Denver, CO by Tim Gill and Mark Pope. The company is best known for its QuarkXPress desktop publishing software. Quark Publishing Software was named such because the company's goal is to "create software that would be the platform for publishing," just as quarks are the basis for all matter. In 1986 Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark as its CEO. Shortly thereafter Quark released QuarkXPress 1.0, and over in the ensuing years Quark Publishing Software rapidly gained market share in the desktop publishing industry. With the release of QuarkXPress 3.0 in 1990, Quark achieved a dominant position in the desktop publishing market. By the end of the 1990's they had gathered a market share of around 90% worldwide. However, Quark Publishing Software was also beginning to be criticized for having slow innovation cycles, high prices, and a generally poor response to customer needs. This led many disgruntled customers to defect back to rival Adobe's new InDesign program as a less expensive and viable alternative. InDesign was initially released in 1999 and resulted in QuarkXPress losing market share. This forced Quark to begin improving both its product and service, currently neither program remains as a consensus dominant product. Quark Publishing Software had previously been engaging in the practice of outsourcing support to India, the backlash against this has cause Quark to begin reverting this policy in 2007. Quark has also been forced to lower its prices to maintain its customer base. Today, competition between InDesign and QuarkXPress remains fierce and market share of the two applications is subject to speculation, especially as InDesign is mostly sold as a part of Adobe's Creative Suite. The last reliable study was conducted in 2004 by Merrill Lynch, which estimated that then the market share of QuarkXPress was eight times higher than competitor Adobe InDesign. Quark at one time was larger than Adobe, and actually tried to buy them out in the 90's. Today Adobe's product line dwarfs Quark, however Quark does continue to compete in a number of industries besides its Quark Publishing Software. These include: Quark Publishing System, a publishing workflow manager; Quark CopyDesk, a professional text editor; Quark Content Manager, a content management system; QuarkXPress Server, a server version of QuarkXPress (formerly known as QuarkDDS); Quark Print Collection, an imposition Software for Adobe Acrobat and QuarkXPress; and Quark Interactive Designer, a Macromedia Flash authoring program. |