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.

Adobe’s gang of four products are InDesign, a direct competitor to QuarkXPress often dubbed the Quark-killer, Photoshop, the widely-used image-manipulation software, Illustrator the vector graphics package and Acrobat which is used for creating and optimising PDF files. One huge advantage that Adobe now have over QuarkXPress is the way in which these programs interact with each other.

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.

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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