![]() Nintendo responded by asking the third party developers to please stop referencing the other company's on-line systems because nobody at Nintendo had any experience with them. ![]() Would it be on-par, or similar in features, or totally different? Pre-launch American third party companies kept asking Nintendo about how the networking system would work, referencing XBOX Live and Sony's offerings as examples. One of the interesting things to come out of it: There's been lots of recent discussion about problems with the Wii U launch by Nintendo. I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.įascinating. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines. I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant. There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen. He was very knowledgable about Quark's code.ĭuring that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. Quark became the ex, and InDesign got the ring.įor what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. Think of it like being dumped by someone you really loved, only to find out there was a much cuter, smarter, funnier person who'd been crushing on you the whole time, just waiting for you to see that they were there. Discovering that InDesign was actually superior to Quark was just the cherry on top. It was actually a bit strange turning to Adobe at first, because they had picked up Aldus, and Pagemaker with it, and it didn't have the best reputation. We didn't "switch" so much as we were forced to look elsewhere when the product disappeared. We weren't about to switch our entire computing platforms, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, just so we could use a layout program from a company that seemed to want us gone.Īs far as the print community was concerned, Quark had stopped releasing software. Anyone who worked in print during the '90s and Aughts knows that Windows was disliked by designers for its poor handling of type and PostScript. Quark simply failed to release a version for the new OS, and like the article says, it treated Mac users with disdain when we asked for it. ![]() It all boiled down to one thing for me as a print designer at the time: OS X.
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