In 1981, when Quark was originally founded, the publishing world had no idea of the momentous changes just around the corner; nor did  In 1981, when Quark was originally founded, the publishing world had no idea of the momentous changes just around the corner; nor did computing, or the printing industry. We had the Xerox Star to tease us (and Xerox), and we had Apple faffing about trying to sell Apple IIIs, but Adobe had yet to arrive. It wasn't until three years later that the ingredients of the desktop publishing revolution came together: layout software, a computer with a graphical user interface and a page description language to image text and graphics in a single data stream. Within a few short years and with many casualties along the way, desktop publishing was making serious inroads into the professional production market. And Quark was leading the charge.

By 1987 when QuarkXPress was released, PostScript was coming of age. Professional publishers were keen to embrace the new technology and developers of traditional front end technology were building new systems based on the tenets of desktop publishing: desktop computers and open standards.

QuarkXPress's greatest asset was the amazing control it offered designers and layout professionals over typography and composition. This, more than anything else, endeared the technology to a fast growing professional user base, and steadily nailed down the coffins of Quark's competition.

Quark's rise was almost meteoric as the company carried everything before it. Within a few years Quark's founders, Tim Gill and Fred Ebrahimi were the stars of the graphic arts conference circuit, heroes setting new standards for their competitors, and full of ideas for how to leverage their amazing success. Simultaneously they struggled to manage a rapidly growing enterprise and a sprawling and obstreperous customer base. The company's response to pesky customers was less than stellar, and problems were compounded as the industry started to move to collaborative tools and workflows. Quark's partners also did not appreciate the flamboyant arrogance that came to so characterise the company in its efforts at collaboration, both personal and technological.

It is well known that Quark managed its customer relations with quite legendary ineptitude. Its exhausting toils with market growth, with conflicting expectations within its huge user base and within the company itself, rapidly undermined what had once been an excellent relationship between Quark and its customers. There are plenty of horror stories, but horror stories or not, such was the wonder of XPress, and such was the extent and loyalty of its user base, that companies tended to stick with Quark. They may not have liked Quark's ‘like it or lump it' attitude, but even when InDesign came along, it took a good five years for Adobe to really steal away much of Quark's market.

Despite its difficulties, Quark claims that the majority of its customer base works on fairly recent versions of XPress. Gavin Drake, marketing director for Quark Europe says: “The vast majority of users upgrade, with minimal [numbers] on version three [and] version four and the majority on version six and version seven”. Quark's customer base still numbers in the millions and not just because of piracy.

Fortunately for Quark, Adobe was itself pretty inept when it came to capitalising on the growing market for an alternative to XPress. Its sluggish response allowed Quark room to go through its growing pains, mature and finally realise that the choice between survival and demise was its own to make. Today after a few false starts, Quark is sincere and energetic in its focus on its core business, supporting its customers and striving to rebuild relationships with its distributors and partners.

Of course the saying and the doing are all too often not the same thing, particularly with privately owned companies managed by mercurial owners. But things really have changed for Quark. The owners, which still number members of the Ebrahimi family but not Tim Gill, recognised they needed tough professionals to manage the company. Quark's future depends on its transition from the industry's least revered vendor, to something akin to a humble champion.

Fred Ebrahimi exited Quark's management a year ago and his daughter Sasha Ebrahimi is now chairwoman. The company's shareholders hired people with the knowledge, experience and dedication to turn the company around. Ray Schiavone is Quark's CEO and runs the business as if it were a public company and fully accountable to its customers, even though it is privately owned and doesn't disclose revenues. Terry Welty is senior vice president for marketing, with a long background in enterprise solutions. Graham Freeman recently left Adobe where he was responsible for global sales to join Quark as senior vice president of sales for Latin America and Asia.

Matthew Wallis senior vice president of sales Europe came from HP in early 2005 tasked with re-engaging Quark's distribution network and establishing tightly managed and responsive communications with its channels in the US and Europe. He recognised that this would be an important step to resolve Quark's relationship crisis with its customer base. He is putting in place the infrastructure and company policies to support and make accountable the Quark distribution network, without undermining its confidence. He says: “We're focusing on the things that we're good at, with good industry partnerships to provide the rest”. Distributors and partners get regular logistics updates, and Quark is “getting out of things that are not our core focus”. All of the new members of Quark's senior management team have solid large-corporate experience, professional managers with proven track records. They are responsible for a workforce of over one thousand people, including some 600 in India.

Quark is opening an R&D facility in Palo Alto, leaving the teams in India to continue developing mature products, and support services. There are also development people based at Quark's headquarters in Denver. The percentage of revenues invested into R&D is in the high 20s, which is some 8-10 points higher than Adobe, even though Adobe has to support well over eighty different products. Quark has aggressive XML-based product development, so that XPress will be better able to support and capture corporate as well as printing and publishing applications, and the “move to multiple delivery” for all content delivery.

It has taken a while to get back their attention, but Quark is also engaging with large accounts including corporates such as banks, travel companies and publishers, repairing important customer relationships at key accounts. This re-engagement is a priority for Quark's new crop of senior executives.

Seven Up?
By the end of last year around 70,000 of Quark's largest customers had moved to XPress 7 and according to Quark the user base is consistently upgrading, especially to the Vista Intel updates. This is good news for Quark as Welty says: “We're seeing the return on our big investment into Vista and Mac Intel.” People are also upgrading because they like the fact that the software is designed to be easy to use across all media formats, so there is no need for users to develop additional skills for repurposing files.

Quark has been rewriting the architecture of QuarkXPress for a number of years to support multiple media formats via what is in essence an internal XML database. This means the content is always maintained independent of the content's formatting on the page. The same content can therefore exist in multiple places, either within the same layout or in multiple layouts: print, web and interactive. For example, a headline in an advert that also appears on a website or in an interactive Flash presentation, can be formatted appropriately for each media type but the content is always synchronised. Users will see the benefits through synchronised content and composition zones in QuarkXPress 7. As Welty explains: “Publishing automatically from a single source of data to lots of different media formats and different target audiences is still something yet to be achieved by most companies. We're focused on this both at the desktop level in QuarkXPress but also at the enterprise publishing level in products such as QuarkXPress Server and Quark Publishing System.”

There used to be an inherent conflict between structured and formatted documents, however it seems that Quark is focused on solving this paradox. The company recognises that exploiting multiple publishing channels demands data format independence. XML is fundamental to this and Quark's lively development community reinforces its XML commitment. XTension developers offer all manner of tools for converting XPress files into tagged XML documents for the web or any other format and vice versa. Unlike Adobe's XML Architecture, which works in conjunction with PDF, Quark maintains XML support independent of the formatting within QuarkXPress 7. As Welty puts it: “Once your content is in XML, automated and personalised publishing to multiple media becomes much easier”.

Its commitment to XML is also helping Quark to forge new relationships with the development community. The company has set up a web-to-print deal with HP Indigo, to drive Indigo presses using XPress Server which is the only technology of its kind using PPML. Quark prefer partnerships to be standards-based rather than just company-based, because working with standards gives them more flexibility for cooperations that benefit customers.

What do the customers say?
After many years of wanton neglect, customers now really are Quark's priority again: there is no choice. This customer-centricity and market responsiveness shows in Quark's efforts to revivify its channels, its quarterly maintenance releases and in its advanced technology developments. The new graphics and print engine in XPress 7 sits on top of the computer's OS, making it in theory easier to hook into other data formats, such as XPS. It simplifies management of different data formats within XPress without converting them.

Welty believes: “Our customer-centric approach is a real strength … we're going to pay attention to our customers and they are what we revolve around”. He wants Quark to focus on giving users the best experience with Quark and with XPress possible. Much more is coming from the server side of the business, because as Schiavone says, “Quark is well positioned because we believe we are well placed for where the market is going, rather than where it is right now.”

One of the biggest catastrophes in Quark's customer relationships was its falling out with its Scandinavian users. The details are gruesome but involved much shouting, borderline abuse, huffy exits and stunned silence. Speaking with one of Quark's Danish customers who moved over to 400 seats running InDesign, we were told that the door is still open for the future. Quark is assiduously courting lapsed customers, and keeping the dialogue with them positive. Now that might be one lone voice in Scandinavia, but elsewhere we have heard similar acknowledgements that Quark has indeed changed.

Future prospects
Quark has taken a long and painful detour from its initial route towards success and glory. In that time it has managed to lose large herds of its user base to a competitor who really didn't have to work very hard to rustle them. Over the years people have turned to Adobe because they were fed up with Quark, so helping Adobe to grow to be the largest software supplier to the graphic arts business. Adobe has broadened its base to increase revenue streams, spreading its reach often via Creative Suite, to influence every part of the business.

But with influence comes responsibility and obligation, the need to fight and grow on many, sometimes conflicting, fronts, while balancing the management of the core business. Adobe has lately been accused of an arrogance not dissimilar to that of Quark's in years gone by. So perhaps there is a strong chance for Quark to re-establish a position for itself as the caring, sharing face of production software development. There is every sign that it's worth giving Quark another shot, and that customers should give the company one last chance to prove itself because, as Wallis promises: “You'll see a different Quark in the next couple of years”. And after all, without Quark, the publishing industry would be a much less interesting place.