It all boiled down to one thing for me as a print designer at the time: OS X.
Quark simply failed to release a version for the new OS, and like the article says, it treated Mac users with disdain when we asked for it. Anyone who worked in print during the '90s and Aughts knows that Windows was disliked by designers for its poor handling of type and PostScript. We weren't about to switch our entire computing platforms, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, just so we could use a layout program from a company that seemed to want us gone.
As far as the print community was concerned, Quark had stopped releasing software. We didn't "switch" so much as we were forced to look elsewhere when the product disappeared.
It was actually a bit strange turning to Adobe at first, because they had picked up Aldus, and Pagemaker with it, and it didn't have the best reputation. Discovering that InDesign was actually superior to Quark was just the cherry on top. Think of it like being dumped by someone you really loved, only to find out there was a much cuter, smarter, funnier person who'd been crushing on you the whole time, just waiting for you to see that they were there. Quark became the ex, and InDesign got the ring.
Yeah, Quark made a lot of mistakes, but I agree that this was the Big One. Quark's audience were Mac users, Mac users were moving to OS X, Quark refused to go with them. Even at the time it was an utterly baffling decision; it hasn't gotten any easier to understand with time.
I would love to read an article that interviews Quark insiders about why they made that choice, what the internal factors were that drove them in that direction. Seeing as how it was basically corporate suicide and all.
I vaguely recall Quark being in the category of things where the software cost more than the hardware. At some level it can make sense to tell the user to switch their hardware and OS (since it's the smaller portion of the cost), but you still need the customers to listen.
There's more to the pain of switching your hardware than just the material cost. As a designer, when I finally got away from Quark, it was good riddance to bad rubbish. Their entitlement problem (No, you switch your hardware, ecosystem, technology culture) went beyond their marketing acumen into their UX design.
It's easy to forget how expensive computers were in this time period. A new high end mac (or PC) could easily set you back $10,000 or more. A Mac IIfx was $8,970-10,970, monitor not included.
Quark simply failed to release a version for the new OS, and like the article says, it treated Mac users with disdain when we asked for it. Anyone who worked in print during the '90s and Aughts knows that Windows was disliked by designers for its poor handling of type and PostScript. We weren't about to switch our entire computing platforms, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, just so we could use a layout program from a company that seemed to want us gone.
As far as the print community was concerned, Quark had stopped releasing software. We didn't "switch" so much as we were forced to look elsewhere when the product disappeared.
It was actually a bit strange turning to Adobe at first, because they had picked up Aldus, and Pagemaker with it, and it didn't have the best reputation. Discovering that InDesign was actually superior to Quark was just the cherry on top. Think of it like being dumped by someone you really loved, only to find out there was a much cuter, smarter, funnier person who'd been crushing on you the whole time, just waiting for you to see that they were there. Quark became the ex, and InDesign got the ring.