Nice Article in NY Times today announcing upcoming release of Quark Killer, i.e., InDesign. Reads like a public relations piece for Adobe. It should give us an excellent pop today.
Doughboy.
March 2, 1999
Adobe Sees 'Quark Killer' Putting New Life in the
Company
By LAWRENCE M. FISHER
AN FRANCISCO -- When Adobe Systems Inc.'s shares hit a four-year low last year,
Quark Inc. floated an informal, and unwelcome, offer to buy the company. On Tuesday,
Adobe will return the favor with the introduction of a new program long known by its code
name, K2, now called InDesign, but referred to by nearly everyone in the publishing industry as
the Quark-killer.
Adobe executives do not use that term themselves, but
they make no bones about attacking Quark in its core
market for high-end page layout software. Rather than an
update of Adobe's familiar Pagemaker program, InDesign
is an entirely new product, the company's first in five years.
Adobe contends that the program offers greater flexibility
than Pagemaker or Quark, while providing tighter
integration with Photoshop and Illustrator, its
market-leading programs for processing photos and
graphics.
Although Adobe's shares fell $2.8125 on Friday to close
at $40.25 amid a general selloff of technology shares, they
remain well above September's low of $23.625, as
improved revenue and earnings have lent credibility to the
company's turnaround effort. Today, shares dropped
another 6.25 cents.
Analysts called InDesign an impressive product that should add to Adobe's revenues later this
year, but they said such programs were often adopted slowly.
InDesign is scheduled to ship in late spring, with versions for the Macintosh, Windows NT and
Windows 98, at an estimated retail price of $699. Adobe is shipping an updated version of
Pagemaker, version 6.5 Plus, available March 15, at $499, or $99 for upgrades from previous
versions. Adobe is also rolling out new versions of GoLive, the Web authoring tool it acquired
earlier this year, and Acrobat, its software for producing so-called portable documents, which
can be read on any system.
The publishing world has long been split between integrated systems, from companies like Atex
and S.I.I., which typically run on minicomputers or mainframes, and desktop systems, like
Quark and Page maker, which run on Macintoshes, personal computers and PC-based
servers.
Adobe is positioning InDesign as a kind of bridge between these two worlds, designed to stand
on its own in smaller installations, or to be bundled with integrated systems for larger publishers.
Customers have been testing so-called alpha and beta versions of InDesign for a year, and John
Warnock, Adobe's chairman and chief executive, said he had no doubt it was partly the
product's visibility that prompted last year's overture from Quark. "They see a freight train
coming their way," he said. "They saw our stock price as low, so why not try to knock it out
with a pre-emptive offer."
But Tim Gill, Quark's founder and chairman, said it was the
combination of the stock price and existing products, not
InDesign, that attracted his attention. "I had forgotten about
K2 when we did the offer, which doesn't mean plenty of
people didn't remind me about it," he said. "There are a
couple of features it has that are really neat, and a lot of
features that have been in Quark Express for some time. I
assume they're going to do a good job, but I don't think
we're going to lose market share."
Two characteristics distinguish InDesign from previous page layout programs, one of which will
be evident to any user, the other more important to developers who want to add capabilities to
the program.
First, InDesign can work with any images created in Photoshop or Illustrator, which saves an
intermediate step of exporting a picture or a graphic to some generic format, and allows much
greater manipulation without exiting the program. InDesign's user interface is identical to that of
Photoshop and Illustrator, so it will look and work in familiar ways.
Most publishers, including Quark shops, already use Photoshop and Illustrator, said Jay
Vleeschhouwer, a computer industry analyst with Merrill Lynch & Company. "The target
market for K2 is one which Adobe has a lot of familiarity with, and which is already using its
other products," he said. "Adobe will not be coming to these high-end users as an unknown
quantity by any means."
Equally important, unlike Pagemaker and Quark, whose architectures date to the 1980's,
InDesign was written using modern modular software design. The core program occupies just
1.6 megabytes, a fraction of the computer memory demanded by most desktop applications
these days, and all major functions are performed by plug-ins, as on a Web browser. This
means that Adobe can add or upgrade portions of the program easily, but, more importantly,
that third parties can easily add value to InDesign by creating custom plug-ins.
"I can as a developer use the components of K2 and integrate it very
tightly into a true newspaper work flow system," said Don Oldham,
president of Digital Technology International, in Springville, Utah, a
leading system integrator for the newspaper industry. "The thing that
Adobe has done that Quark doesn't is to open their development
environment to us."
Both the plug-in capability and the integration with Photoshop and
Illustrator appeal to Jeffrey Fulton, technology director for Time Inc.'s
Business Information Group, which has been testing InDesign for a year. With Quark, you
always had to "plan your work so that you had all your image work done before you went to
page layout," he said. "People are just fed up with Quark Express, so that they're ready for
something really new," he added.
But analysts said Adobe needed developers like Digital Technology if it was to meet Quark
head on.
"Because Adobe doesn't have all of the pieces yet, they need to get these other developers to
support them," said Mark Walters, editor of The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing. "The
plug-in architecture is critical to attracting the mass of developers that have been following
Quark. The product has a strong feature set, but by itself that isn't enough."
Good technology is not enough either, said Suzanne Snygg, an analyst with Dataquest. "The
biggest issue for Adobe is the matter of standards. Once you commit to a program like Quark
Express, companies and people are reluctant to change, just because of the pain factor," she
said. "Just because a product is best doesn't mean people will change." |
