Will QuarkXpress Survive The Adobe Onslaught
QuarkXPress has enjoyed some 15 years of total dominance of the professional page layout software arena. However, it now looks set to become an underdog in a market which is increasingly being dominated by Adobe InDesign and the other programs that make up the Adobe Creative Suite, a software bundle which is rapidly becoming a must-have for any serious graphic design software set-up.
It’s hard to see how QuarkXPress can be the eventual winner in this battle. For one thing, it is the only main product that Quark make; Adobe have the entire Creative Suite, in all its many varieties, and will presumably continue to think up clever benefits to using InDesign, the main competitor to QuarkXPress, in conjunction with the rest of the creative suite. This strategy is all the more likely to succeed when you consider that most QuarkXPress users will also be users of Photoshop and possibly other programs in the Creative Suite.
Many will say that Quark only have themselves to blame for the uphill struggle they now face. It’s almost as if they believed that their position in the marketplace was somehow unassailable. QuarkXPress was for many years way overpriced and lacking in features but it was the only piece of page layout software which could be relied upon to deliver consistent results in the prepress environment.
Having these two great products battling it out is basically a good thing for the marketplace. QuarkXPress 7 included features which are a clearly a direct response to features introduced in InDesign CS2 and we can expect this kind of tit-for-tat development to continue in future releases of the two programs.
In response to Adobe’s claims of tight integration between InDesign and other Creative Suite programs, Quark seem to be taking the “If you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. QuarkXPress now allows the importing of files saved in Photoshop’s native .PSD file extension and has a nifty PSD Import palette which allows sophisticated manipulation of elements within the file. Because these changes are shown in the context of the final layout, there may even be an argument for making these changes in QuarkXPress rather than Photoshop.
Will these tactics be enough to guarantee the survival of QuarkXPress? Most designers and publishing professionals see Adobe Creative Suite as the future. However, QuarkXPress is used in lots of different contexts and by users with vastly differing profiles. By responding to the needs of its potential market, Quark can ensure that QuarkXPress stays alive and continues to be recognised as an excellent piece of software.
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