Quark, Inc.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
Quark was founded 1981 by Tim Gill and Marc Pope and first released word processing software for the Apple II and Apple III.
1986, after Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark, the company became financially successful, mostly due to its flagship product, QuarkXPress, which - together with Adobe's PostScript, Photoshop and Apple's computers - can be seen as the founding blocks of Desktop Publishing. QuarkXPress offered the precision and feature set the DTP community needed and rival PageMaker didn't offer at that time.
In the 1990's QuarkXPress 3.x gained around 90% marketshare of page layout applications. Its editorial workflow system, called QPS, sold almost a thousand times to magazines and newspapers, cementing the high marketshare.
However, the high marketshare was probably the reason for Quark being perceived as relucant, having low innovation cycles and high prices. This inspired Adobe to launch a competitive product, called InDesign, in 1999.
Tim Gill, formerly the CTO of Quark, left Quark in 2000 and sold all his shares to Fred Ebrahimi. This leaves Mr. Ebrahimi being the sole owner of Quark Inc. (as Mark Pope had already left in the early nineties).
In 2003 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 subdivision of Chandigarh.
In the past the company unsuccessfully launched a picture editing application and a multimedia authoring tool, both are not part of Quark's portfolio anymore.
In 2006 Quark Inc. offers - beside QuarkXPress and QPS - a content management system, called QuarkCMS; a server-based version of QuarkXPress, called QuarkXPress Server (formerly known as QuarkDDS); and a Flash authoring program, called Quark Interactive Designer.
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 SicolaMartin, 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.
On Nov 1, 2006, Quark appointed Raymond Schiavone, co-founder of Arbortext, as its a new CEO.
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 estimates the market share of QuarkXPress is still eight times higher than competitor Adobe InDesign.
