Introduction

Is the publishing industry headed for interesting times? It sure looks like it... Let’s give a little reminder of the previous chapters. Professional Publishing has some pretty strong standards: one is the Macintosh platform, which (despite nay-sayers) remains worldwide the computing environment of choice for this industry. And then we have a few key software packages, such as QuarkXPress, which has been the overwhelming market leader for professional print publishing since the late eighties.

So far, so good. As we all know, Apple has been pretty busy lately turning Mac OS X into a viable, industrial strength operating system, and in the case of the Macintosh, the first industry which springs to mind is of course design and publishing. Developer support for Mac OS X has been impressive: by now, practically all major application packages are available in a Mac OS X native version.

All except one: QuarkXPress. And that’s where the story is beginning to get more complicated. Quark released XPress 5.0 in early 2002, in a Mac OS 9-only version. At the time, this was frowned upon by professional publishers, but since this is generally a conservative industry and nobody was in a hurry to migrate to Mac OS X at the time, it did not exactly create an uproar. (That Adobe concurrently released InDesign 2.0, which works on both Mac OS 9 and X adds a little zest to the situation, especially since the market seems to be warming up to Adobe’s offerings in terms of page layout.)

But, thus far the situation wasn’t too bad: Mac OS 9 still works quite nicely, and professionals would be able to switch to Mac OS X when Quark is ready to ship a native Mac OS X version. But as of late, things became a bit more difficult: in September 2002 Steve Jobs announced that, starting January 2003, no new Macintosh model would be able to boot into Mac OS 9.

A twist in my sobriety?

For professional publishers, this heats up the situation considerably. Quark has announced repeatedly that it is hard at work at the next release of its page layout program; rumor even has it that Apple is lending Quark a helping hand to speed up development on Mac OS X.

But there’s another fascinating twist, which, it turns out, does not make the publishing industry very happy: at a Special Interest Session about QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign at Seybold San Francisco, James Therrien, manager of professional services at Quark, acknowledged that the next major version of QuarkXPress will run only on Mac OS X and Windows; not on Mac OS 9.x. Quark has also made it clear that this new version will be a different code-base from QuarkXPress 5.0 - not a simple carbonized version of the currently shipping product.

This is where IT managers in the publishing industry start being worried: moving to Mac OS X is a major issue for them. Not that they doubt that the future of the Macintosh lies with the new Unix-based OS from Apple, quite to the contrary. If anything, Apple has been taken more seriously by technology managers in this business since it released Mac OS X. But just as anybody in charge of a mission critical production environment, these people like to take things at their rhythm and pace - and for a significant number of them, changing operating systems at the same time as upgrading a major piece of application software does not sound like the ideal way of doing things.

This situation is rapidly turning into something of an issue for the publishing industry. Quark has not committed to a date for the new release of its page layout program. Although industry insiders anticipate an announcement of QuarkXPress “X” at MacWorld in January 2003, most professionals do not seem to expect a shipping version of the program before second quarter of 2003 at the earliest (and probably quite a bit later outside of the United States.)

How can you deal with this situation? Of course you can go on with your current equipment and keep your fingers crossed. But what do you do if you suddenly have to replace a machine in a production environment, and all you can buy is a Macintosh which only runs Mac OS X? (Running QuarkXPress 4.1 in Classic mode is not a very popular solution)

What would the market really need?

The reality is, that in most cases one wants to get rid of one problem before tackling the next: move to Mac OS X with the tools you know, or upgrade your tools without having to think about the operating system. This may be painful to accept for Quark, but what the market would really like today is not QuarkXPress 5.5 or 6.0 (or whatever the Mac OS X savvy release will be called). No, what most current XPress-users would really want is a free or at least cheap upgrade of QuarkXPress 4.x, running on Mac OS X natively.

After all, XPress 5 sales have fallen far short of Quark's expectations, as most professional publishers opt to stick with the five-year-old Version 4 (or sometimes even the much older 3.3x release)—or jump the gun and move up to Adobe InDesign, which with Version 2.0 has edged ahead of Quark in terms of functionality. And this is beginning to translate into market share, as an increasing amount of design studios, advertising agencies or magazine publishers are embracing Adobe's offering.

October 10, 2002

©2002 Pfeiffer Consulting