By Ian Betteridge
Once upon a time, there was a software company called Quark. Quark had, through a combination of smart engineering and aggressive business practices, become the dominant player in the nascent field of desktop publishing. If you were a pro publisher, you used QuarkXPress. The only real alternative – Adobe’s PageMaker – was sneered at as the ‘prosumer’ option, the thing you used for a club newsletter. Real publishers used Quark.
But there was a price to be paid for veneration at the Temple of Quark. And it was a heavy price. Every time there was an upgrade – and each upgrade was less and less compelling – the cost seemed to spiral up and up. Discounts were few, and many customers had to spend thousands of pounds per seat while getting support that was best described as pitiful. Quark wouldn’t talk to them. It wouldn’t talk to journalists.
So, when Adobe came along with a nifty little piece of software called InDesign, the huddled masses of publishing pros rose up and, with a cry of ‘Screw you, Quark!’, ditched the old software for the young pretender.
The fact that it cost loads less helped. Even though InDesign 1.0 wasn’t anywhere near as polished as QuarkXPress, people jumped ship. Then, as it got more polished, their friends came, too. Gradually, it became the default choice. Before it knew it, Quark had moved from dominance to also-ran, and it’s spent much of the last decade trying to regain ground. Only now is it finally doing so.
Thus we reached a situation where one company dominated professional design tools: Adobe. But now, here comes Creative Suite 5.5. Customers who bought 5.0 just a few months ago will find themselves shelling out another £300-odd for an upgrade – and one that adds relatively few new features. That’s on top of the £1500 or so they’ve already paid.
Photoshop, the most widely used app in the bundle, hasn’t been upgraded at all. InDesign gets exciting new tools for creating digital editions, but to actually release any digital editions to customers, users have to spend several thousand pounds more on top. Not only are there fees to release publications as apps, but Adobe wants a cut every time anyone buys a copy. If you need really advanced tools, you’ll want the Enterprise version – price on application.
Or perhaps they’d prefer to rent the software on subscription, for around £100 per month. Upgrades are included if the subscription is still being paid when the next upgrade appears. That’s scheduled to be every two years. You do the maths.
The fact is that Creative Suite 5.5 does remarkably little to justify its cost. Like Quark before it, Adobe thinks it’s the only game in town for serious publishers and is pricing its products accordingly – where ‘accordingly’ means ‘eye-wateringly high’. To add insult to injury, incidentally, it also applies some of the highest exchange rates in the business to its UK pricing, meaning UK users pay substantially more again.
You might think that, having dethroned Quark, Adobe would be a little bit savvy about the fact that customers could easily build up a wellspring of resentment if you treat them as cash cows. But looking at the never-ending ways the company appears determined to squeeze every last penny, nickel and euro-cent out of publishing customers, I suspect it has simply forgotten the story of why InDesign took off so quickly all those years ago.
In the same way as designers used to bemoan the never-ending spiral of poor QuarkXPress upgrades at higher and higher prices, they’re now complaining about exactly the same thing from Adobe. Only the lack of credible alternatives is currently preventing that wellspring from boiling over. From being the company that designers loved, Adobe is now the company that designers love to hate.
While QuarkXPress 8 and now 9 present an increasingly credible option for page layout, including similar and cheaper digital publishing tools, there’s still no serious competition for applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator, or for the Creative Suite as a whole. Could another player come along and do to Photoshop what InDesign once did to QuarkXPress?
Some commentators think not, insisting that Photoshop is simply too established, and now too big, for a challenger to make any headway. But they forget that, on launch, InDesign wasn’t better than or even equal to the contemporary version of QuarkXPress. Although its design tools were innovative, it was lacking in many other areas and was, to put it mildly, somewhat buggy.
What gave it its foot up was simply that people were so fed up with Quark that they were willing to ignore the rough edges, simply to stop having to pay through the nose for fewer new features in every upgrade cycle.
For its own sake, I hope Adobe will remember the tale of King Quark.
Ian Betteridge is a former editor of MacUser. He now works as a digital content strategist.
