Quark (Remember Them?) & Ray Kurzweil Take On Adobe InDesign For Making eBooks
In the mid-’90s, Quark was the leading tool for print publishing. It was a generation ahead of Adobe’s PageMaker, which in those days I called the “publishing tool of Satan.”
But Adobe launched the more economical InDesign, connected to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash. Soon, Quark was in Adobe’s digital rear-view mirror.
Last week, Quark announced a series of partnerships to win back glossy-publication developers trying to move onto digital platforms. The idea is that elements can still be created with Adobe products, but Quark will be the layout tool that gives designers control on the presentation layer. And it will do this in Ray Kurzweil’s free Blio eReader platform.
Quark could have made a big deal out of this with user endorsements and an effort to differentiate themselves significantly from Adobe. Instead, the official video does little to sell viewers on Blio, and the campaign feels like a feature upgrade, not a revolution.
It’s true that small changes can start a tidal wave, but Quark has to do more to be earth-shaking. And without that, Adobe will not be moved from its dominant position.
Find more coverage here in VentureBeat.
The future of digital experiences will be built by strategists who grasp the full array of emerging business, social, and technical models. Specialties in user experience, branding, application design, and data science are laying the foundation for richer user experiences and business models breakthrough products and revenue based marketing.
2 Responses to "Quark (Remember Them?) & Ray Kurzweil Take On Adobe InDesign For Making eBooks"
July 1, 2010
Ho Hum. InDesign CS5 still blows this away. No one is going to care because QuarkXPress could never do much out of the box, and here they had to partner with someone else to do what InDesign CS5 already does… and more. Much, much more. Now if Quark would focus on just what it was suppose to do, then maybe. Both are focusing on web a bit too much, but at least InDesign lets you put headlines across columns, and working with text is a dream next to Quark, or Quirk as we all use to call it. Sad. Can’t blame them for 1 more last ditch effort and even then they are still just catching up to what InDesign does out of the box.
July 5, 2010
Hi Dee,
That’s about how I see it — partnership is the option when development and marketing budgets aren’t enough to win.
What get me is how “Ho Hum” their whole campaign is. They still have an installed based they can rev-up, but this is like a muddled feature release.
It could have been a contender, or burnt out on a big idea. I’ll take your work about Adobe’s better product, but with no doubt, their positioning and marketing is a light year ahead.