Tagline: Revolutionizing Publishing. again.
Creator of the extremely popular professional layout software - Quark Press. The popularity and prevalence of this software is so high that, to paraphrase a classic of communist poetry, “we say Quark Press, we mean Quark Inc” and vice versa.
The company was founded in 1981. At first, the software it produced worked exclusively on computers. Apple. First version Quark Press appears in 1986, that is, only a year later than another, once popular layout program PageMaker, companies Aldus Corporation. The new software turned out to be so successful that in a year it becomes the standard for desktop publishing systems. It took another four years to conquer more than 90% of the entire publishing market. This rapid development has been detrimental to Aldus Corporation, which in 1994 was bought by Adobe Systems. The opposition of these programs even got the name Desktop Publishing War (The Desktop Publishing War). However, the war was not too protracted and, as we see, ended in the complete defeat of one of the parties.
However, such global dominance has never benefited anyone. With virtually no competition, Quark Press is developing too slowly, the cost of its license is prohibitively high - on average, from 800 to 1000 US dollars per copy. Innovative innovations first appear less and less, and then they stop altogether. But a standard is a standard. Users grumbled displeasedly, but there was still no choice.
In 1998 Quark Inc. is trying to acquire Adobe System. The financial capabilities of the company then allowed such a deal to be carried out. Thus Quark would immediately get rid of a small, but still competitor in the face of PageMaker. To my credit Adobe I must say that she managed to fend off the claims Quark.
Quark Press reigned supreme on both the Mac and PC platforms (the Windows version appeared in 1992), until 1999, when Adobe InDesign. long time company Adobe continued to support and develop PageMaker, without nevertheless making serious attempts to win back the market - with the available opportunities, this was useless. All this time she was creating a new program. Using the most successful solutions used in PageMaker, as well as adding a lot of new own, Adobe suddenly presented to the world community a fundamentally new software that turned out to be able to shake the throne Quark.
However, in Quark Inc. far from immediately realized how much of a dangerous competitor they got. The company continued to believe that its position is unshakable, they are the creators of the absolute standard and everyone should reckon with this. It even went so far as to Quark Inc. refuses to create a version of its program for the latest operating system Apple - MacOS X. However, users did not even think about changing the platform, they begin to change the layout program, choosing InDesign, which worked on both PC and Mac. Quark Inc. presumptuous, forgetting that in publishing Apple not just a standard, but the basis itself. Yes, and changing one program is much easier than changing the hardware completely. share Quark slowly but surely began to decline. That's when the company probably regretted that it had not been able to acquire a brazen competitor earlier.
Further Quark Inc. was much more accommodating. The times of reclining on laurels are over. When, in 2006, Apple switched processors from PPC to Intel*, Quark Inc. promptly introduced a new version of Quark, well ahead of its competitor.
To date, Quark Inc. still holds a large part of the market, is still the standard, although its position has been hit hard by the invasion Adobe. Which, moreover, continues to lead the offensive, having a number of serious advantages (for example, it is the creator of such important programs as Photoshop и Illustrator, as well as the most popular PDF standard, so support for them in InDesign much easier to do).
Headquarters Quark Inc. is located in Denver, Colorado, USA (Denver, Colorado, USA). Representations can be found both in Europe and Asia.
*) Truly, what is forgiven to Jupiter is not forgiven to the bull! No other company could have made two such provocative castlings in such a short period of time. The change in software required for this requires a lot of effort from its developers (and sometimes from users) with its adaptation - in the case of the advent of MacOS X, everything generally had to be rewritten again.
