Quark and QPS

A couple of weeks ago, David Minehart sent me a link to a very helpful article about the supposed new attitude at Quark. Craig Cline of creativepro.com describes Quark's old attitude very well in the opening of the piece, but ultimately offers some hope for content publishers:

Quark's fall from grace was largely of its own making - a combination of contradictory and some would say punitive policies, customer service and tech support horror stories, and a perceived arrogance that just rubbed people - particularly egalitarian Mac users - the wrong way. And last but not least, Quark absolutely dominated the professional publishing market, and we all know how well people like near monopolists (can you spell M-i-c-r-o-s-o-f-t?). No matter that behind the scenes Quark has listened to the marketplace, has seen that the future lies with workflow solutions and not just point shrink-wrapped products, and has quietly put together an impressive suite of multi-channel publishing system products that appear to deliver what the market has been asking for. There are just a lot of people out there who are pissed off at the company.

It's no surprise, then, that the company has taken this as a wake up call and is moving into overdrive to rectify the problems of its recent past -- and to get a jump start on inventing its future - with one of the most complete implementations of a multi-channel workflow publishing system that I've yet to see. (read the rest here).

I really hope this is true and Quark delivers for the sanity of publishers everywhere. As it stands right now, our use of QPS 2.1 (Quark Publishing System) creates a really aggravating problem for our Art department: QPS 2.1 only runs under OS 9, and because QPS integrates with software like Adobe Photoshop to provide QPS check-in/checkout functionality within Photoshop's menus, our Art folks have to run a version of Photoshop that runs under OS 9, meaning they can't take advantage of the latest version of Photoshop. Theoretically, we could run OS X on their desktops and run QPS and Photoshop in OS 9 under Classic mode, but we would still be stuck running OS 9 versions of Adobe software to preserve the QPS integration (and running lots of RAM-hungry apps in Classic mode just doesn't work well). Even worse, Apple stopped shipping systems that would natively boot into OS 9 a while back, which means not only are we stuck with using earlier versions of software like Adobe Photoshop, we're stuck with older machines that boot into OS 9. This is a silly and frustrating place to be. (If I'm missing something and we could be handling this differently, I would love to hear from you.)

I met with folks from Quark a couple of weeks ago and they seem very well aware of this conundrum. Here's hoping that a year from now, the old Quark will be a distant memory.