Quark's Response

This email was the reponse sent to readers who emailed Quark about MacEdition's recent story on Quark and OS X.

Simply put, Quark is not shifting its focus away from the Mac platform. Our focus remains on helping our customers solve their business problems. We will continue to support the platforms our customers want to use. We'll develop software for Mac OS and Windows as our customers want to use those platforms.

If you cut through the purple prose, you'll see that a handful of comments have been taken out of context and re-cast in an unflattering manner by an anonymous writer who was not present at the event during which they were allegedly spoken.

Let me bring back some of the context. The fact of the matter is that the publishing industry is hurting. Ad revenues are down globally -- down as much as 70% in some regions. Look on any newsstand and you'll see that there are far fewer titles than there were two years ago, and page counts are down across the spectrum. Major dailies across the nation are closing bureaus and merging departments. Ad firms are fighting for business while corporations cut spending and bring work in house. Publishing is in a crisis. There is only one major software company that I know that has dedicated 100% of its resources to publishing: Quark. The technologies that we talked about in New York are designed to help publishers do more with fewer resources without sacrificing quality.

With respect to Mac OS, our market data indicates that fewer publishers are purchasing Macs, and more of our Mac-using customers are considering switching to Windows. That doesn't mean we're any less committed to Mac OS. Mac users constitute the majority of our customer base. We will continue to support Mac OS (and Windows) as long as they are the platforms of choice by our customers.

The Mac OS X version of QuarkXPress is far along in its development cycle, but there is still a lot more testing to do before we release it. We're working to bring that release to you as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality. It will be a high quality application with some paradigm-shifting new features and consequently represents a significant development and testing effort that simply takes time.

The anonymous writer points out that Mac OS X Server is not on the agenda for the version of QPS that uses a Microsoft SQL Server database or for Quark Digital MediaSystem, which uses an Oracle database. There's an obvious reason. Neither Microsoft SQL Server nor Oracle runs on Mac OS X. What they omitted is that we emphatically stated that the clients for both these publishing systems will run on Mac OS X.

In fact, the relationship between Quark and Apple is closer than it has been in years, and I think that the industry will be pleasantly surprised by some of the initiatives that Quark and Apple will bring to the market in the near future.

Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further.



Glen Turpin

Communications Manager, Quark, Inc.