Will Quarkxpress Survive The Adobe Onslaught

QuarkXPress, for so long the dominant force in the page layout arena, now finds itself fighting for survival and under attach by four products all created by Adobe, who look like achieving the same kind of dominance in the creative market that Microsoft have achieved in the general computing market.

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.

A fair amount of complacency with their apparently unassailable position as the best page layout program out led Quark to make several key strategic errors such as the release in 2002 of QuarkXPress version 5 for Mac OS 9 (an obsolete version of the Mac operating system) shortly after Adobe had released InDesign 2 which ran on the latest Mac OS X operating system.

Users of page layout programs look like being the main beneficiaries of the rivalry between InDesign and QuarkXPress. The release of upgrades to QuarkXPress has greatly accelerated in the last few years, with version 8 not far away and each release now bringing genuinely improved functionality.

Several of the new features in QuarkXPress 7 indicate that Quark are now fully awake to the threat posed by InDesign and are responding to it. QuarkXPress 7 allows the import of native Photoshop files (.psd) and has a special PSD Import palette containing options for manipulating imported Photoshop documents. Users can change the opacity and blend modes of the original Photoshop layers and work with alpha and spot colour channels.

So, what does the future hold for QuarXPress? Well, whilst it now appears that most design professionals see InDesign as the future of page layout, it's important to remember that not all users of QuarkXPress are designers. A lot of corporations now buy QuarkXPress for producing in-house publications. So, in the future, we may see different flavours of the program emerging aimed at different types of user.

About the Author

The author of this article has been teaching QuarkXPress training courses for many years. He is a trainer with Macresource Computer Solutions, an established, independent computer training company based in London. Click here for other unique 'Quarkxpress' articles.

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