Quark Inc.

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Quark

logo
legal form Inc.
founding 1981
Seat Denver , Colorado
management Ray Schiavone
Number of employees 1000
sales (not published)
Branch Computer, software
Website www.quark.com/de

The company Quark, Inc. is a privately held, US-based companies, and mainly as a manufacturer of the software QuarkXPress known.

The name Quark is intended to symbolize the company's goal of producing software that serves as a substantial platform for publishing, i.e., like every Quark , it is the basis of all matter .

history

Quark was founded in 1981 in Denver , Colorado , USA by Tim Gill and Marc Pope under the name Quark Engineering with seed capital of $ 2,000 . Quark Engineering first developed word processing software called Word Juggler for the Apple II and Apple III, as well as a program called Catalyst, which was supplied by Apple with the Apple IIe and which allowed disk-based programs to be run from the hard drive.

According to Fred Ebrahimi , who as 1986 CEO joined the company and took over shares, the company has since been profitable mainly by the success of their "flagship" QuarkXPress , which - together with Adobe's PostScript , Photoshop and Apple as one of the founding fathers of the - Computer Desktop Publishing seen can be.

Right from the start, QuarkXPress had the precision and functions that media designers and layouters needed and that its competitor PageMaker couldn't offer at the time. In the 1990s, QuarkXPress 3.x achieved around 90% market share in professional layout tools. Quark's editorial system Quark Publishing System (QPS), which has been on the market since 1991, has been sold around 1000 times and thus cemented QuarkXPress' high market share in magazines and newspapers. Both founding members are no longer involved in Quark. Mark Pope left Quark in 1990; Tim Gill, then CTO of Quark, left Quark in 2000 and also sold his shares in Fred Ebrahimi.

In 2003 Quark followed the general trend in the USA to outsource parts of the development department and technical support to India and built a technology park there called QuarkCity in Mohali , a suburb of Chandigarh . This was partially revised in 2007 with the opening of a research and development department near San Francisco. In order not to be dependent on one product, Quark tried to place an image processing program ( QuarkXPosure ) and a multimedia authoring program ( QuarkImmedia ) on the market in the mid-1990s . Both programs are no longer part of Quark's product range.

In early 2005, coinciding with Fred Ebrahimi's resignation as CEO of Quark, Quark announced that it would respond to increasing competitive pressure from Adobe and began cutting prices and shortening product cycles. To complete this change to a customer-oriented and friendly company, there was a new logo at the end of 2005, designed by Sicola Martin, part of the Young & Rubicam network. However, shortly after the logo was released, bloggers made public the resemblance of the new logo to the existing Scottish Arts Council logo . As a result, a new logo was designed and announced in March 2006, which Quark still uses today. On November 1, 2006, Raymond Schiavone , founder of Arbortext, was appointed as the new CEO of Quark and has led the company ever since.

Expanded business areas

In early 2008, Quark began to devote itself to dynamic publishing. The company-wide document management system, which includes desktop products such as QuarkXPress and server solutions such as DPS, is intended to expand the manufacturer's business areas beyond the target group of publishers and agencies. The term is now outdated. In the meantime, the focus is on content automation solutions with the target groups of large companies, organizations and corporations, whereby the core product is still Xpress. On August 9, 2011, the owners, the Ebrahimi family, sold their shares to the Californian investment company Platinum Equity . After XPress launched a series of innovations on the market in spring 2017 (e.g. image editing is now possible within XPress), the private equity company Parallax Capital Partners, an investor specializing in software development based in Southern California, took over the company in July 2017.

Acquisitions

Quark acquired several companies in the late 1990s. In 1996 Quark took over a minority stake in Colossal Pictures, San Francisco . Colossal produces and designs films, 1997 mFactory, which produced an innovative multimedia authoring system with mTrolopis , and in 1998 Coris Inc. , a subsidiary of RR Donnelley and Sons , which produced the software product Coris Publisher 3.0 .

The most spectacular takeover bid Quark made was the 1998 announcement that it would take over Adobe after they had to cut 300 jobs (10% of the workforce at the time) and Adobe's share price plummeted. Adobe, protected by its shareholder laws, was able to fend off the takeover. Quark bought and integrated the Munich-based system integrator and software developer Silent GmbH, better known through its subsidiary Vision GmbH .

Another acquisition in 2005 was the purchase of the American XTension developer alap, which produced imposition software and power tools for Adobe Acrobat , Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. In 2008 Quark took over In.vision Research Corporation, a software company from Florida (USA), which among other things has developed an add-in for XML authoring with Microsoft Word . In 2010 Quark acquired Gluon , known as the developer of QuarkXPress XTensions and plug-ins for InDesign and Illustrator, and a dynamic publishing system called HyperPublishing System.

In 2012, Quark acquired MobileIQ, a British / Californian development company for mobile websites, native apps and web apps. MobileIQ offers an InDesign Xtension to create HTML5-based apps directly from InDesign. Quark kept the InDesign solution (which is still sold under the name App Studio to this day) and integrated the same technology into QuarkXPress.

Since 2012

Currently (March 2012) Quark's product range consists of:

Quark, Inc. is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Development departments are located in Denver (CO), Maplewood (NJ), Santa Clara (CA) and St. Petersburg (FL), all four in the USA, Dublin (IRL) and Chandigarh, India. Sales and marketing offices are located in Australia , Germany , England , France , India , Japan , Poland and several cities in the USA .

Quark has approximately 1,000 employees worldwide.

Market shares

Due to the strong competition between QuarkXPress and InDesign, market shares in particular are always the cause of wild speculation and emotional debates. Since InDesign is mainly sold as part of the Creative Suite, and sales figures do not necessarily mean market shares, there are no reliable figures on market shares. The last reliable study was carried out by Merrill Lynch in 2004 , which concluded that QuarkXPress then had a market share eight times the market share of Adobe InDesign.

There are over three million legal users of QuarkXPress worldwide, according to Quark.

History of the German branch

  • until 1993: No German branch, representation by Prisma GmbH.
  • 1994: Opening of the first German branch in Bietigheim-Bissingen .
  • 1996: The German branch moves to Ludwigsburg .
  • 2003: The German branch moves to Hamburg (Gänsemarkt).
  • 2013: Relocation of the German branch to the Speicherstadt (Hamburg).

Web links

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  1. ↑ Quark Company History. Retrieved April 27, 2010 (English).
  2. ↑ Tim Gill's curriculum vitae, including references to founding Quark. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 9, 2012 ; accessed on August 10, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.glbtq.com
  3. ↑ Platinum takes over Quark. Retrieved August 9, 2011 .
  4. ↑ Gores sells Quark Software to Parallax , cpwissen from July 13, 2017, Parallax Capital Partners acquires Quark Software , Print from July 13, 2017
  5. ↑ Quark press release. Retrieved April 27, 2010 (English).
  6. ↑ Quark press release on the MobileIQ acquisition. Retrieved July 17, 2014 .
  7. ↑ QuarkXPress product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  8. ↑ QPS product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  9. ↑ QuarkCopyDesk product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  10. ↑ QuarkXPress Server product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  11. ↑ Quark XML Author product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  12. ↑ Quark Web-to-Print System product page. Retrieved on August 10, 2011 (German).
  13. ^ Quark Promote Service. Retrieved August 10, 2011 .
  14. ^ Website of Quark subsidiary Gluon. Retrieved August 10, 2011 .
  15. ↑ Quark App Studio product page. Retrieved on March 13, 2012 (German).
  16. ↑ Quark Brandmanager product page. Retrieved on March 13, 2012 (German).