MacEdition reports on the current status of QuarkXpress for Mac OS X.
Publishing professionals who attended a Quark-convened “executive summary” in New York last week are still abuzz over the performance of Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi, a gentleman whose outbursts make Steve Jobs seem like Captain Kangaroo.
The ostensible topic du jour: the pending integration of Quark Publishing System and Digital Media System within a framework of Microsoft’s .Net and SQL Server technologies. Notably absent from the roadmap: any support for Mac OS X Server.
Indeed, these witnesses attest, audience questions about Mac OS X provoked an Ebrahimi tirade of Old Testament proportions: Quark‰s Dear Leader told his squirming guests that “the Macintosh platform is shrinking,” and that “publishing is dying.” He suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment should “switch to something else,” although he insisted that making the move to Adobe’s long-Carbonized InDesign package is “committing suicide.”
“Everyone was stunned, and most folks left by noon,” one attendee reported. “It was awful.” Although many of Quark’s hapless visitors were lured to the gathering by a promised demo of XPress for Mac OS X, Quark provided precious few details and no time line.
The implication there is that anyone staying with Quark at this late stage is committing suicide. FWIW, I made the move to InDesign full-time when v2.0 was released and haven’t looked back since.