It’s no secret that Adobe’s esteem has taken a vigorous plunge in the eyes of designers since it unilaterally put them all on the monthly subscription model with its Creative Cloud software last May. Since then, it’s done a bang-up job of rolling out improvements – credit where it’s due – though it’s also made a few missteps along the way. There was the day-long outage, hassle over renewals owing to a massive hack attack, and most recently pricing fluctuations in Europe depending on the browser you use. It’s enough to make a designer feel taken for granted.
Now along comes a design-software company that knows a thing or two about making you feel taken for granted, seemingly determined to lure you away from Adobe’s cloud in 2015.
QuarkXPress is promising a new version of its software in the first quarter of next year, and asked designers to vote on the features they wanted most – the top 10 most-requested ones are be included in QuarkXPress 2015. Creative Bloq has a nice little roundup of the new features on offer.
Our question is whether there’s anything Quark could promise to win you back to the fold. The rivalry between the two companies’ products is legendary, with the received wisdom being that QuarkXPress lost most of its once-95% marketshare to Adobe as much because of the former’s allegedly abysmal treatment of its customers as for Creative Suite’s keen new feature set.
Meanwhile, a single LinkedIn question (“Just curious…how many of you graphic designers are still using Quark?) by marketing professional Linda Karp back in 2012 has to-date generated 703 comments…and counting.
