Quark, Inc.
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Quark, Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado) is a privately owned software company best known for QuarkXPress. It is called Quark 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. [1]
As of October of 2007, Quark's offerings include:
- QuarkXPress (QXP) - desktop publishing layout editor
- Quark Publishing System (QPS) - a publishing workflow manager
- Quark CopyDesk - a professional text editor
- Quark Content Manager (QCM) - a content management system
- QuarkXPress Server - a server-based version of QuarkXPress (formerly known as QuarkDDS)
- Quark Print Collection - Imposition Software for Adobe Acrobat and QuarkXPress
- Quark Interactive Designer - a Macromedia Flash authoring program.
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[edit] Company History
Quark was founded under the name "Quark Engineering" 1981 by Tim Gill and Mark Pope [2]. Between 1981 and 1985 their primary products were Word Juggler and Catalyst. Word Juggler was the first word processor on the Apple III, and was one of the founders of desktop publishing. Catalyst was a program that was distributed bundled with the Apple IIe, and allowed users to run floppy-disk based applications from their hard drive. They also attempted a product line called "Quark Peripherals", but the market for storage devices at the time resulted in a huge financial loss.
In 1986 Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark as CEO. Shortly thereafter Quark released QuarkXPress 1.0, and over the years that line became the standard for desktop publishing. With the release of QuarkXPress 3.0 in 1990, Quark quickly achieved a dominant position in the desktop publishing market. By the end of the 1990's they gathered a market share of around 90% worldwide.
In the late 1990s, Quark was criticized for having slow innovation cycles, high prices, and a poor response to customer needs, therefore many customers welcomed the release of Adobe InDesign as a less expensive and viable alternative. The availability of InDesign, which was initially released in 1999, resulted in QuarkXPress losing market share. InDesign also demonstrated the first significant competition for that market, which forced Quark to lower prices and invest more into service and marketing. As of 2007, neither QuarkXPress nor InDesign can claim a dominant position.
In 1990, Mark Pope sold his share of the company to the other partners. In 2000 Tim Gill left Quark and sold all his shares to Fred Ebrahimi, leaving Mr. Ebrahimi as the sole owner of Quark, Inc..
In 2001 Quark followed a US trend of offloading their programming and technical support to companies in India, migrating most of its development resources to India, by building a technology park ("QuarkCity") in Mohali, a city in the state of Punjab bordering the state capital, Chandigarh. In 2007 Quark started to revert this trend by opening a development center in the Bay Area.
Beginning of 2005, coinciding with the retirement of Fred Ebrahimi as CEO, Quark announced that it would change and started to lower prices and release versions more frequently.
End of 2005 Quark announced a new logo, designed by Sicola Martin, a division of Y&R Brands. The logo's purpose was to be the last step of Quark's new image into a more friendly and inviting company. Soon after they released the new logo, it found backlash from bloggers on the Internet, who noticed the striking resemblance to the Scottish Arts Council logo. In response to these criticisms, a new logo was announced in March 2006, which Quark still uses today.
On November 1, 2006, Quark appointed Raymond Schiavone, former CEO of Arbortext, as its new CEO.
[edit] Product History
Quark's first products were word processing software for the Apple II and Apple III [3]. In 1987 it released its best known product, QuarkXPress, for Apple Macintosh. In 1992 it also released the product for Microsoft Windows. Along with Adobe's PostScript, Photoshop and |Apple's computers, QuarkXPress could be considered one of the founding blocks of Desktop Publishing. QuarkXPress offered a degree of precision and set of features which were needed to make desktop publishing viable, and which rival PageMaker didn't offer at that time.
In the 1990s QuarkXPress 3.x gained around 90% marketshare of page layout applications. Its editorial workflow system, called Quark Publishing System, sold almost a thousand times to magazines and newspapers, cementing the high marketshare.
In the past the company unsuccessfully announced a picture editing application, QuarkXPosure, which was never released, and a multimedia authoring add-on XTension for QuarkXPress, QuarkImmedia. Neither is part of Quark's portfolio anymore. The company briefly purchased and marketed a standalone multimedia authoring program, mTropolis, before discontinuing it in the late 1990s.
Today, competition between InDesign and QuarkXPress is still fierce and market share of the two applications is subject to speculation, especially as InDesign is mostly sold in conjunction of Adobe's Suite (and therefore doesn't imply market use). The last reliable study was conducted 2004 by Merrill Lynch, which estimated that then the market share of QuarkXPress was eight times higher than competitor Adobe InDesign.
[edit] Offices
Quark has several offices worldwide[4]:
Development centers:
- Mohali, India
- Denver, USA (headquarter)
- Santa Clara, USA
Operational offices:
- Cheyenne, USA
- Neuchatel, Switzerland (European headquarters)
Sales & Marketing offices:
- Hamburg, Germany
- London, United Kingdom
- New York, USA
- Paris, France
- Tokyo, Japan
[edit] References
- ^ Quark: About Quark - Company History
- ^ glbtq >> social sciences >> Gill, Tim
- ^ Quark: About Quark - Company History
- ^ Quark: About Quark - Worldwide Offices
