Desktop publishing perestroika
Six months ago, the initial release of Adobe InDesign seemed like an unstoppable force in the realm of professional publishing.
After two years of speculation by yours truly and others (and a development cycle that reportedly stretched back to Adobe's acquisition of PageMaker creator Aldus Corp. back in the first half of the '90s), the San Jose, Calif., graphics giant finally delivered its state-of-the-art page-layout package. But the move seemed destined to shape more than individual desktops: It also appeared poised to reshape the monolithic DTP market, which PageMaker had long ago ceded to QuarkXPress.
Indeed, the buzz surrounding InDesign seemed to have as much do with support and service issues as with specific features. With its compact, modular architecture; robust support for Portable Document Format; and tight integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (already leaders in their markets), InDesign was an impressive debut, to be sure; nevertheless, print and prepress pros seemed at least as excited about the opportunity to reassess their dependancy on XPress developer Quark Inc.
To say that many longtime XPress users nursed a love-hate relationship with its creator would be to put it generously. Over the years, even sites that swore by the publishing capabilities of XPress were more than likely to swear at Quark for what was widely perceived as its lackluster support, usurious upgrade pricing and all-around arrogance when it came to the customers behind its hegemony.
That was then; this is now. A few funny things have happened in the months since the arrival of InDesign 1.0.
First of all, most users soon reached the unsurprising conclusion that the first rev of InDesign was too raw to entrust their workflows to. No lesser light than Thad McIlroy, a publishing consultant who serves as program director for Seybold Seminars in Foster City, Calif., this week told MacWEEK, "InDesign is premature; Adobe is still filling in gaps," Besides some bugs and performance issues, users complained about limitations in text handling and restrictions on output.
Adobe has done a lot to address these complaints in InDesign 1.5, which the company shipped this week. In the process, however, the company bought itself a PR headache with the decision to charge $99 each for upgrades to the $699 application. The move kicked up a dust storm of indignation among users who were shocked that Adobe was asking for a substantial per-seat fee to fill gaps in such a freshly minted application.
Even Adobe executives expressed some misgivings about the gambit. "I think that people are pleased with the features we are offering in InDesign 1.5 but disappointed that a free bug fix didn't come first," David Evans, Adobe senior evangelist for professional publishing, told ZDNet News this week.
But not all InDesign's wounds were self-inflicted; while Adobe has faltered in its DTP foray, Quark has been working overtime to rehabilitate itself with its users.
In a recent column examining Apple's decision to skip February's Seybold gathering in Boston, I opined that the snub probably wouldn't do much to shake the notoriously slow-to-change publishing industry from the Mac platform; to illustrate the point, I cited Quark's classically dysfunctional relationship with its customers.
A Quark representative was quick to call me on that characterization, and at long last I'd like to set the record straight: Based on everything I've been hearing from major publishing sites, the company's sales and support have improved exponentially in the past year, and users are enjoying a better relationship with Quark than at any time in the company's long history as top DTP dog.
Mac users can draw special sustenance from the company's new attentiveness to its installed base: While Adobe has remained strangely reticent about its commitment to Mac OS X and its PDF-based Quartz graphics layer, Quark has been outspoken about supporting both.
Is it a coincidence that Quark began to evince this new attitude at the very moment when Adobe took the wraps off InDesign (e.g., March 1999, at Seybold Seminars Boston/Publishing)?
As a fan of both "Crime and Punishment" and the Rankin-Bass version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," I'm a firm believer in human (and yeti) redemption. Nevertheless, I have to suspect that Quark's award for "friendliest booth staff" at this year's Seybold gathering had as much to do with the specter of Adobe as the spirit of good fellowship.
InDesign remains an exciting product, and I'm pleased at Adobe's apparent commitment to rapid, aggressive upgrades. From the sound of it, its current pricing misstep will be a lesson learned, and the company will do a better job of differentiating bug fixes from true evolutionary steps in future releases.
In the meantime, however, I'm convinced that both Adobe's early adopters and Quark's hardcore loyalists are already far better off than they were under the previous one-party system.
Mac veteran Matthew Rothenberg is senior news producer at ZDNet News.