Will InDesign fade into obscurity like Quark Express (sic)? - LOCKED

[TonightWeDineInHELL]

Do you remember way back when Quark acted like they owned the planet (because they kinda did) and ignored the desires of their customers? Do you remember what happened? Adobe created InDesign 1.0... it was buggy, crashed all the time, was full of problems, and everyone switched from Quark to use it.  Why did they switch? Well, Indesign offered many of the  features users had been demanding from Quark for years.  AND these same users were angry... angry at Quark, because to continue as professional designers meant they had to put up with Quark's obnoxious hey-what-other-software-are-you-gonna-use attitude.

Now, fast forward to today. Design professionals are (again) angry. They can't continue to use CS6 with it's unfixed OS incompatibles. They want a perpetual license for InDesign and don't want to pay Adobe until doomsday, just to be able to open their files. Adobe's attitude? "Hey-what-other-software-are-you-gonna-use?"  These angry customers are ripe for the picking. If a young eager software company released even a half-decent layout application (with a perpetual license) that could open .indd files, it could be game-over for InDesign.  So, what do you all think? Will InDesign fade into obscurity like Quark Express?

[Abambo]

They probably also faced the burden of unmaintanable code.

[rob day]

Then they were slow about releasing an OS X version,

It's easy to forget that Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000. Quark took the gamble that OSX wasn't going to make it and they were wrong. OS9 was unusable, which made Quark unusable—it really didn't have much to do with feature sets.

[Abambo]

You're right! Apple was once a company in a difficult situation. Steve Jobs sold all his shares, becaus he did not belive that there was a future. Strange world... 🙂

[rob day]

Right and there's no equivalency today. The complaints about the subscription model really come down to the perception of a price increase—technically it all works better than manual upgrade installations. If Quark had put out a workable OSX version right away at a higher price I wouldn't have hesitated staying with them.

[richardk32]

Rob, for me it has nothing to do with perception or reality of a price increase. Indeed, since I updated like clockwork on each new release of Creative Suite, paying monthly would have been cheaper, had the option been available. It has to do with the ability of Adobe to take away my access to my work, all my work, should I fail to ante up in as little as 40 some odd days.. Yes, eventually, I will have to keep a older Mac running an older version of MacOS to continue to run CS6. But I will have paid for a perpetual license to those apps, that OS, and that hardware. I don't get, or expect, eternal upgrades, without at some point paying for them. But I also don't buy (literally)  the model that allows you to take back something you've already licensed, with no option to say "No, I don't need, or want, the newest changes you've decided need to be made to my workflow."

[BobLevine]

And again, you could wait a year or more and re-subscribe for a month to get that work done.

You can spin this over and over and over again. Nobody is stealing your work or holding it hostage.

[rob day]

It has to do with the ability of Adobe to take away my access to my work

I have a box of DAT tapes with gigabytes of archived book covers and annual reports that I can't get at because the drive died, it had a SCSII connector, and the page layouts are Quark 4.11. So assuming the tape isn't corrupted, I would have to go to considerable time and expense finding a way to get the files copied, which would need considerably more time and effort to get converted correctly into ID files. If you had asked me in 1999 if a was worried about losing access to my page layout archive I would have thought you were being paranoid.

[Abambo]

I still have a drive, but no SCSI anymore (I think that my computers with a SCSI port got scraped as my video installation with a special laser disk and a Beta SP video recorder).

NASA lost hundreds of megabytes (?) of data, because they lost the ability to read their old tapes back. But we still can read the Codex Aureus of Echternach (Codex Aureus of Echternach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ). Their DTP was much more advanced... That's the technological progress...

[Scott Falkner]

You're right! Apple was once a company in a difficult situation. Steve Jobs sold all his shares, becaus he did not belive that there was a future.

Those shares, which he sold in 1997 for $22 million, would be worth over $3 billion today.

[PAWU]

Yes!   But who cares...I should have bought those shares at that time, but I didn't! (sic)

[jane-e]

TonightWeDineInHELL wrote:

Do you remember way back when Quark acted like they owned the planet (because they kinda did) and ignored the desires of their customers? Do you remember what happened? Adobe created InDesign 1.0... it was buggy, crashed all the time, was full of problems, and everyone switched from Quark to use it. Why did they switch?

So, what do you all think? Will InDesign fade into obscurity like Quark Express?

TWDIH,

Do the newer versions of QuarkXPress do tables that are really tables? That's what won me over to InDesign! Also Object Styles, Cell Styles, Table Styles, Parent-Child Masters, and much more. I didn't switch with 1.0 or 1.5. I waited until 2.0 when it wasn't buggy.

If something newer and better comes out, will I remain loyal to InDesign? I no longer use Ventura Publisher, PageMaker, or QuarkXPress because InDesign is awesome. If something more awesome is developed in ten years or five years or next year, I will keep my eyes open. But that time is not now.

Does this answer your question?

[MW Design]

Well, Jane, you could always download the trial version...

There are two types of tables. One is the legacy-type of tables you used back whenever. There are also the new tables that are called in-line tables that connect live with an Excel file and have great capability.

If you have a Lynda.com membership, Mike Rankin has a good course complete with example files.

QuarkXPress 2016 Essential Training

There are YouTube videos on the Quark official channel as well.

I use both ID & QXP nearly everyday. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. And bugs. Quark is taking a fairly pro-active stance on bug fixing, updates and adding features these days, though.

[jane-e]

Thanks, MW — I'm glad to know that QuarkXPress is alive and well and that they have tables figured out. I'm aware of Mike's video, and it's been on my list of things to watch...when there's time...if there's time...

There is still a soft spot for it in my heart, but I am a contractor and no one asks me to do jobs in it anymore.

It's also good for InDesign to have a competitor. It keeps both companies on their toes.

[Steve Werner]

I've been teaching InDesign in the San Francisco Bay Area regularly since InDesign 2.0. In the past ten years, I have run into no one who has ever mentioned that they use QuarkXPress except those who are moving away from it to InDesign. Not one person.

[MW Design]

Our experiences are simply different, Steve.

In setting books I find that X number of large publishing houses still use QXP. They are simply geared up for it. I get QXP tagged text spit out of a database a few times a year. And I create code for some institutions to pull out the tagged text for their SQL databases--and QXP tagged text is far more simple and equally as powerful as ID's tagged text (which is onerous in comparison).

QXP tagged text is so simple that when I get MS Word manuscripts from small publishers whom do not desire to spend the money for me to write the queries, I have macros that convert it all to QXP tagged text (including attributes such as bold, italics, etc). Once the styles are set up, it all just flows in so pure and perfect. If I had to rewrite those macros to output ID tagged text I would likely rip out my hair and gouge my eyes out.

At the end of the day, what I care about is making my nut. I could care less what I use. I think as of a few years ago, the percentage of ID vs. QXP work I got was 60/40 respectively. Last year it was tipped the other direction (just, though).

When it comes down to it, these applications are simply tools. I'll use what the work requires--even if setting a book in MS Word or Publisher was required (and it has been). I apply the same reasoning to vector drawing applications, image editors, etc. Why in the world should I care?

I do have my application preferences when it is left up to me. But most of the time the application I use is dictated by what the client wants in return at the end of the job.

[korra.creative]

CC is great value for money, it allows their company to make a constant income in order to keep all employers and keep working hard at updates and new features. If you don't believe this, you don't support the industry. Stop being cheap and bite the bullet, CC is worth every penny

[LouisMackay]

This discussion has had one false premiss, which is that there are no alternatives for Photoshop and Illustrator, and that the CC bundle therefore has no serious competition - at least as far as the print designers' trio of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are concerned. However, there is now also the option of Affinity Designer (instead of Illustrator), and Affinity Photo (instead of Photoshop). I must admit that I have not myself used these applications yet, but they have been very favourably received as ‘serious contenders’. Still using CS6, I have been waiting for Affinity to bring out it's long heralded Publisher page layout application, and this does, admittedly, seem to be well behind schedule, though beta in 2017 is still announced (it remains to be seen whether that will materialise). It is for this reason that I am, at a reasonable price, renewing my QuarkXpress licence for the 2017 upgrade, and that, coupled with the Affinity applications, all on permanent licences, will be my fall back when CS6, now beginning to look shaky, finally falls of its perch. It is still there, blinking, not quite yet an ex-parrot, but I get the feeling it won't be long. Adobe have some time ago withdrawn technical support for CS6, and it isn't designed to run on newer Mac OS versions. Since installing CS6 nonetheless on my new iMac, Indesign CS6, long my main workhorse, has remained more or less usable, but it is crashing more often, and its type rendering on the HD screen is poor - far poorer than even Microsofts Office's.

I was among the many Mac-based designers who 15 years or more ago, infuriated by Quark's sudden manifestation of neglect and arrogance (after a dozen years of using Mac Quark as an unmatched page layout application), turned gratefully to Adobe's Creative Suite, and really felt warmly towards Adobe, particularly for its development of InDesign, which proved to be a truly excellent application that I have very seldom had any reason to gripe about. The same was already true of Photoshop – a fantastically good tool. The same cannot be said of Illustrator, which, as others here have pointed out, was in many respects far inferior to Freehand, which Adobe unaccountably killed off without adopting its good features into Illustrator. Adobe has done absolutely nothing good with Freehand since (by all accounts not even in CC), and the ludicrous and indefensible absurdities of Illustrator's data charting features alone stand as a damning indictment of Adobe's neglect. That was the beginning of my growing disaffection with Adobe; long before any question of CC or the subscription model.

It is easy to see the advantages to Adobe of the subscription model, and I don't doubt that it has facilitated a quicker response to the OS changes that Apple has made. Bigger design practices no doubt can easily enough afford the subscriptions, and perhaps don’t care about being able to access their archived projects for some lean years after their approaching retirement. For small companies and individual freelancers, not necessarily working with big budget clients, however, the additional cost of the CC subscription is a real issue, when the workable alternative for all of us who wish to stay legal (there are surely plenty who don’t bother), has been to buy an permanent licence upgrade, at a favourable price (as I am now doing with Quark) every 3 years or so. It isn't ideal, but that is the best compromise between continuing to function and taking too much out of one's modest revenue. It is simply not a fair accusation that us small fry, being too slow to upgrade,  are 'the reason' Adobe has turned to the subscription model (neither Quark, Microsoft nor Affinity have found it necessary to withdraw the permanent licence option). Small fry are evidently neither a positive or negative consideration for Adobe - they obviously couldn't care less about us, and that arrogance is exactly what reminds many of us of Quark 15 years ago. Well, I’m glad Quark understood what had happened, and have survived.

It would be nice to be able to say the same of Adobe in 15 years time - and of Apple for that matter. I’m not sure either will be around, as Huawei, or Chinese or Indian outfits we haven’t yet heard of may well have driven them out of existence with far cheaper products. Meanwhile, to those contributors to this exchange who echo some of Adobe’s barking arrogance in their ‘Get real’ comments, let me say that, while I will do what I can to keep working with the dying parrot of CS6 for as many days as it has left in this world, my way of getting real is to prepare for an afterlife with QuarkXpress and Affinity, not with CC.

[rob day]

In the end the market decides whether the subscription model survives and whether the software is good or bad.

In 2001 Quark bet that Apple was going under (its stock was at $1) and understandably would not invest in an OSX version until it was too late. OS9, which was the platform 95% of graphic design and print production professionals used in 1999 was the real problem not Quark—it simply did not function.

So far the market is saying the Adobe subscription model and software works fine.

[LouisMackay]

That's a fair observation. My feelings towards Adobe are a matter of disappointment, not malice - I said it would be nice if they have survived in 15 years' time - but with a better understanding of their smaller clients. And it is true that the whole issue is partly a matter of what Apple does or doesn't develop in its OSs, which application developers have to find their way around in a sustainable way. Even so, as your own point underlines, what a stock price graph shows in a particular year doesn't necessarily reflect what it shows 15 years later. Apple have done brilliantly with smartphones, but will that continue now their market is pretty much saturated and it is hard to think up any prettier devices? And will anyone use an Apple computer in 10 years time? Already a lot of film and CG professionals find Mac hardware, pretty though it may be, unusable; it won't support their graphics cards. Microsoft will mop  up the last of them.

Huawei mobiles are a lot cheaper than iPhones, and the market for their lower-priced product is vast. Adobe can cover themselves by focusing on Windows. They might as well go the whole hog now, and leave the last few Mac-using dinosaur professionals with Affinity and QuarkXpress. Cold-bloodedly, how much point is there for Adobe in continuing to develop for Mac?  We know they don't care about small users. Why should they care about a moribund market sector? This is a Mac user asking.

[Steve Werner]

I think this discussion has run it's course. It's starting to devolve into another Platform Wars discussion. I'm locking this discussion.

[Dov Isaacs]

LouisMackay  wrote

…Huawei mobiles are a lot cheaper than iPhones, and the market for their lower-priced product is vast. Adobe can cover themselves by focusing on Windows. They might as well go the whole hog now, and leave the last few Mac-using dinosaur professionals with Affinity and QuarkXpress. Cold-bloodedly, how much point is there for Adobe in continuing to develop for Mac?  We know they don't care about small users. Why should they care about a moribund market sector? This is a Mac user asking.

The MacOS market is highly profitable to Adobe, especially for its Creative Cloud products? Why would you even think that Adobe would even consider abandoning the MacOS market in the creative arena? That would make no sense whatsoever. And certainly there is not even any such discussion within Adobe!

          - Dov