Jun 04
The world’s most customer friendly company
2004 at 02.25 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Well, it sure ain’t Quark if you ask me. First a little history for those who aren’t familiar with Quark’s practices. When I started my business in 1992, one of the programs I needed was Quark XPress (version 3.1). In those days when you bought XPress, you received temporary diskettes to start with. You could use them for only a few weeks until you received your final ones. So when they arrived you needed to reinstall XPress.
If I’m not mistaken the dongle horror story only started when the PowerMac entered the scene. To upgrade to the PowerMac version you needed to pay upfront and then hold your breath for about 7 weeks to receive the upgrade. When I received it there was trouble with the dongle so I had to call the Quark dealer for the Benelux (Deventer, The Netherlands). The staff there never had any lessons in customer care, it was an attitude like “Quark is king and what do I care about you?!”. You almost had to beg to get something done in a reasonable way. To get a long story short, this Quark dealer isn’t around anymore, big surprise :-)
Now when you need Quark support (in Europe) you have to deal with the Swiss office. As some of you know, I have recently upgraded to a PowerBook 17” and needed to reinstall my XPress 6. I got a hunch that Quark would be the one to give me all the “installing” hassle. Guess what, I was right :-( When I first fired up the app there was a friendly greeting telling me that I had too many installs (this was the 2nd!) and that I had to renew my license code. I had 2 options, one was over the Internet and the other by phone.
I tried over the Internet which didn’t work. Off to the second option, by phone. First an international call, which lasted 30 minutes in total. After spelling an amazing long install code the lady tried it on her system to give me a new code… it didn’t work on her side. Off to ask her colleague to try again… after the third effort luck was on our side. She gave the looong number.... off to spelling again… I got an error ... but AMAZINGLY Quark showed us the field where the error was, can you believe that? Quark programmers are smart, aren’t they? If I ever switch to a G5 (or G6?) the same story will repeat itself :-(
The end conclusion is that my love for InDesign has only grown A LOT! If it wasn’t for those silly old printer shops who still swear by XPress I would have dumped this program long time ago. It is not only an expensive program, I really hate working with it. Luckily our print partner has no issues with InDesign or PDF output, but unfortunately I don’t always have the option to choose my printer, sometimes the client prefers his own printer and most of the time they demand Quark files.
Idiots, life it so much easier in InDesign if you ask me. I love all the superb handling of text, the transparency, importing native .ai, .psd files… When InDesign came to the market it was clear that Quark would hold its own, but things have changed and InDesign has covered a lot of ground since then. And I see a bright future.
21served
1
There are two kinds of blog entries I always welcome.
The ones that bash Quark in favor of InDesign and the ones that bash old-fashioned web-building in favor of CSS.
Two years ago I was saying to people “Dump Quark, it sucks ever since 1998 and will suck more with time”, and they disagreed and told me InDesign is too slow and they hate OS X. Now they work in OS X with InDesign and say “how could we ever live without it”.
2
Having used <ahem!> Quark for years, I got complete sick of the weird update system they employed. I moved to InDesign a couple of years ago and have never looked back. Now if only Adobe would fully integrate Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign into one single peice of software rather that the Creative Suite mess, I would be ready to live designers heaven.
3
There will soon (but not soon enough!) come a ‘tipping point’ at which printers who only use Quark and can’t handle InDesign or PDF will go out of business, and Quark will disappear of our docks forever - and good riddance!
4
Wow. One would assume that with the release of the Creative Suite, Quark would at least be on top of aspects like customer support, seeing as how the application alone can’t stand up against the competition.
5
long-term vision is a strange word in many companies vocabulary! Try to convince them and you’ll hit a brick wall. The moment they notify that their intentions were so wrong, they haven’t got the budget left for reversal . Pity but true . Think before you act !
6
I work for a pretty big publishing company (newspaper) and we made the decision to switch whole scale to InDesign back on version 1.5. We still have a few diehards here and there, and a few advertisers that insist on using Quark, but my job got a hell of a lot easier without Quark.
I am tech support, not design, but I can figure out most anything in ID. I’d be hard pressed to make a newsletter in Quark.
I can install the entire Design Collection CS in the time it takes to do one Quark install. That number you complain about. Let’s address that further. It’s 47 characters long, and one single string. Not even broken into nice little blocks that correspond with the fields you have to enter it into. You also need the serial number, and the previous serial number. Yack!
It took me 35 minutes to get this one app installed. And yes, I see the irony about complaining about a half hour software install (used to be pretty standard when stuff was on a dozen floppies).
I love your blog, btw. Been reading for a while now.
7
I interact with newspaper designers on a pretty regular basis. Quark is on it’s way out, they have succesfully upset enough individuals with horrible customer support. By the way, it seems that another product has a strong following in the newspaper industry:
http://www.creatorsoftware.com They are about to release version 7 later this month along with a new website design, cannot wait.
8
Ahh, the fun of quarks support/upgrades etc. We still had CricketDraw (Quarks predecessor) until recently.
9
hhmmm seems like things go the other way with you folks over there… in good ol’ germany there’s not the slightest bit of a possibility of influencing designers in what kind of data to throw on our desk (we are printers specializing in die stamping, embossing, foil stamping and so on). quark sucks. xtensions people use causing unopenable files suck. since a few weeks we have a g5 with cs. importing quark files works most of the times, but that feature is a little adventurous sometimes (especially with quark files generated on windoze machines - but who does that...). the future belongs to indesign. definitively. i love those typographic features. trying to get the same result drove me mad in the past…
10
Oh boy do I love to hear about people praising InDesign! I’ve been trying to get people to change since 1.5 as well. I love it with all my heart minus one problem. I am using InDesign CS and many of the printers around here (Oklahoma isn’t exactly known as a design capital by any stretch of the imagination) either use Quark only, or haven’t found the need to upgrade to InDesign CS; and since InDesign CS can’t/won’t save down to InDesign 2.0 format, that usually causes many headaches. But for the most part that’s not a problem since the printers seem to love PDF format.
Once the area catches up, I think I’ll be set for a while :-)
11
How does InDesign work on a PC? I’m an old PageMaker fan from the days of Aldus and those little portable tabletop Macs, but lately have been using a Dell and found PageMaker type couldn’t be condensed or extended beyond the three default measurements for each.
When my printer here on the central coast printed out the proofs, my condensed type at -85 came out at -70. What’s up with that Adobe?
Has anyone experienced these type of flaws using InDesign on a PC?
12
switch to indesign - like i did - and send pdf-files to the printer ...
those diskettes makes me smile - i found them in my “got-useless-box” - just now.
i remember - that was the beginning of the end - you had to have the startdisk in the slot - to run x-press - my disk was damaged after 3 weeks ... the rest is x-press-customer-service-quirks-history.
13
Man oh man do I understand that story. Although Quark 6.1 has kept me using Quark for now. Although if I had an extra 1200 dollars I would buy Adobe CS pro in a heart beat! And as result switch to InDesign. I hate having to call quark and get a new very long install code. macromedia lets you “Transfer” your license then re-install and use your serial num. A much better way I think. If you forget to transfer your license then you have to call them to get the activation reset. Quark as a comapny has always been bleck. Much like Apple was back in the 80’s. I am suprised Quark made it this far.
14
Could any body tell me what the split of the Quark passport 6.1 serial is? I have the number but it is all one number and if I paste it into the first box it does not split out to the other boxes. Thanks.
15
Andrew, I’m afraid you have no choice here but to enter it manually :-( Quark :::sigh:::
16
No thats fine but it is all one big number..! Do you know what the split is between the boxes ie. 7 digits per box..? :-)
17
Hi Andrew, I see. I just started my Quark to see if I can look this info up again but it only gives me my serial number. I don’t have this activation number anymore and I don’t remember this unfortunately, sorry :-(
18
Thanks anyway. :-)
19
Just finished taking an InDesign class - my teacher said that Quark is definitely on the way out, and anyone still using it must be crazy or clueless!
InDesign has so many advanced publishing features, it isn’t funny. It is definitely the best program- and leave it to Adobe to come up with something that is the best. I am not a Mac user, except at school - but I love all of the OpenFace type fonts, and the best thing is they are cross-platform. InDesign will also automatically save your file, if you have a computer crash.
20
If anyone wants to discuss the virtues of InDesign more, or other user issues, please contact me!
21
sorry - just trying again to get my email to show up.