Quark Software Inc.
| Home > Browse Our Collection > Computing Companies > Quark Software Inc. |
Quark Software Inc. (originally Quark Engineering) was founded in 1981 in Denver, Colorado by Tim Gill and Mark Pope with the original objective to "create software that would be the platform for publishing", just as quarks are the basis for all matter. Between 1981 and 1985 the primary products were Word Juggler and Catalyst. Word Juggler was the first word processor on the Apple III. Catalyst was a program that was bundled with the Apple IIe, to run floppy disk-based applications from a hard drive. They also attempted a product line called "Quark Peripherals", but made a huge financial loss. In 1986 Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark as CEO and co-owner. In 1990, Mark Pope sold his shares to the other partners, then in 2000 Tim Gill left Quark and sold all his shares to Ebrahimi. In March 1987 Quark released QuarkXPress 1.0, which due to its precision quickly gained market share from Aldus PageMaker. With the release of QuarkXPress 3.0 in 1990, and the Microsoft Windows version In 1992 it achieved a dominant position in desktop publishing. By the end of the 1990s they had a ~90% market share. In the late 1990s, Quark had poor understanding of customer needs and time to market with high prices. Many customers welcomed the release of Adobe InDesign in 1999 and Adobe Creative Suite in 2003 (including InDesign with Photoshop and Illustrator) resulting in ongoing loss in market share for QuarkXPress. At the end of 2006 Fred Ebrahimi gave all his shares of Quark Inc. to his children, with his daughter Sasha Ebrahimi taking the position of chairman. Under the new leadership of Raymond Schiavone, Quark started to refocus its resources towards the enterprise dynamic publishing market (now Content Automation), announcing a new strategy in March 2008. In the 1990s QuarkXPress 3.x gained around 90% market share of page layout applications. Its editorial workflow system, called Quark Publishing System, sold almost a thousand to magazines and newspapers. The company announced a picture editing application, QuarkXPosure, which was never released, and a multimedia authoring add-on XTension for QuarkXPress, QuarkImmedia. The company briefly purchased and marketed a standalone multimedia authoring program, mTropolis, from mFactory before discontinuing it in the late 1990s. Quark acquired two companies creating add-ons for QuarkXPress and InDesign, ALAP in 2005 and Gluon in 2010. In March 2008, Quark announced a new direction. Quark acquired an XML editor vendor in 2008, a company called In.vision Research Software Products
Magazine Articles About Quark
|
People Related to Quark :
|
