Desktop publishing in the early 1990's
Quark XPress all the way. 95% market share. And then, Adobe InDesign came out.
A fun walk down memory lane from Dave Girard writing at
Ars Technica:
How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing
As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.
Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do�or fail to do�that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn�t listen.
A great story with visual examples of the two programs. There is also a cautionary note at the end -- Adobe is sitting high on the mountaintop and is jacking the prices and not listening to customers.
Who is out there writing the new Adobe-killer?
I used to do a lot of desktop publishing -- had a small print shop with copiers and two offset presses for six years and had a lot of fun.
Me? I was in the 5% running
Ventura Desktop Publisher running on MS-DOS with the GEM graphics extension. More
here. Ventura had some serious advantages over both Quark and InDesign but with only a few percent market share, a lot of people overlooked it. Stupid. It was a fun time.
Be sure to read the 250+ comments for some great reminiscences.
Posted by DaveH at January 18, 2014 12:55 PM