Quark Inc.

The company Quark, Inc. is a privately held, US-based company and known as the makers of the software QuarkXPress.

The name Quark is to symbolize the company's goal to produce software that serves as a substantial platform for publishing, so how each quark is also the basis of all matter.

History

Quark was founded with an initial investment of $ 2,000 in 1981 in Denver, Colorado, USA, by Tim Gill and Marc Pope under the name of Quark Engineering. Quark Engineering first developed a text processing software called Word Juggler for the Apple II and Apple III as well as a program called Catalyst, which was delivered by Apple with the Apple IIe and allowed to leave floppy-based programs run from the hard drive.

According to Fred Ebrahimi, the CEO came in 1986 with the company and shares took over, the company has since become profitable, mainly through the success of their " flagship " QuarkXPress, which - seen as one of the founding fathers of desktop publishing - along with Adobe's PostScript, Photoshop and Apple Computer can be.

QuarkXPress had from the beginning, the precision and the functions that a media designer and layout needed and the competitor PageMaker time could not offer. In the 1990s, managed QuarkXPress 3.x as to approximately 90 % market share in professional layout tools. Quarks editorial system Quark Publishing System (QPS ) has been on the market since 1991, has sold about 1,000 times and so cemented QuarkXPress ' high market share in magazines and newspapers.

Both founding members are no longer involved in Quark. Mark Pope left Quark 1990; Tim Gill, previously CTO of Quark, Quark left in 2000 and also sold his shares to Fred Ebrahimi.

In 2003, Quark followed the general trend in the U.S. to outsource parts of the development department and technical support to India, where he established a technology park called Quark City in Mohali, a suburb of Chandigarh. This was back in 2007 partially revised by opening a research and development department near San Francisco.

In order not to be dependent on one product, Quark tried the mid-1990s an image editing program ( QuarkXPosure ) and a multimedia authoring program ( QuarkImmedia ) to place on the market. Both programs are no longer part of Quark's product range.

In early 2005, coinciding with the resignation of Fred Ebrahimi as CEO of Quark, Quark announced that it would respond to the increasing competition from Adobe and began to lower prices and to shorten product cycles. As a conclusion of this change to a customer-focused and friendly company was late 2005, a new logo, designed by Sicola Martin, a part of Young & Rubicam network. However, shortly after the publication of the logo made ​​Bloggers the similarity of the new logo with the existing logo of the Scottish Arts Council public. Then was designed and announced a new logo in March 2006, the Quark uses to this day.

On 1 November 2006, Raymond Schiavone, founder of Arbortext, appointed as new CEO of Quark and since then, the company operates.

Since the beginning of 2008, Quark Dynamic Publishing has been the subject written on the flag, the desktop products such as QuarkXPress and server solutions includes as DPS.

On August 9, sold in 2011, the owners, the Ebrahimi family, all shares in the California investment firm Platinum Equity.

Acquisitions

Quark has taken over the late 90s several companies.

In 1996, Quark took a minority stake in Colossal Pictures, San Francisco. Colossal produced and designed movies.

In 1997, took over quark mFactory, which established an innovative multimedia authoring system with mTrolopis.

In 1998, the company Coris Quark Inc. (not to be confused with Corel ), a subsidiary of RR Donnelley and Sons, which manufactured the software product Coris Publisher 3.0.

The most spectacular takeover offer, which made curd, 1998 was the announcement to take over Adobe after this (at that time 10% of the workforce) had to cancel 300 jobs and Adobe share price slipped into the basement. Adobe, protected by its shareholder laws could fend off the takeover successful.

The Munich-based systems integrator and software developer Silent GmbH, better known by his daughter Vision GmbH, purchased and integrated Quark 1998.

The further acquisition in 2005 was the purchase of the American XTension developer alap, the imposition software and Power Tools for Adobe Acrobat, Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress produced.

2008 took over the quark In.vision Research Corporation, a software company from Florida (USA), which has developed among other things, an add -in for XML authoring with Microsoft Word.

2010 acquires Quark Gluon the company, known as a developer of QuarkXPress XTensions and plug-ins for InDesign and Illustrator as well as a dynamic publishing system called Hyper Publishing System.

Today

Currently (March 2012 ) consists of quarks product range:

• QuarkXPress - professional layout program (since 1987)
• QPS - editorial system and workflow solution (since 1991)
• QuarkCopyDesk - professional text editor, specially designed for editorial workflow (since 1991)
• QuarkXPress Server (formerly QuarkDDS ) - Server version of QuarkXPress for web-based publishing (since 1993)
• Quark XML Author - XML Editor in Microsoft Word (since 1996, since 2008 by Quark )
• Quark Web -to-Print - web-based editor for print templates
• Quark Promote (only Australia, Ireland and the USA) - Print- on-Demand Service
• XTensions for QuarkXPress and plug- ins for InDesign
• App Studio - Software Troika Quark XTension, App Factory and Internet portal to create native iPad apps
• Quark Brand Manager - SaaS offering to make media about web editor brand- compliant

The headquarters of Quark, Inc. is located in Denver, Colorado. Development departments are in Denver (CO), Maplewood (NJ ), Santa Clara (CA ) and St. Petersburg (FL ), all four United States, Dublin (IRL ) and Chandigarh, India, settled. Sales and marketing offices are located in Australia, Germany, England, France, India, Japan, Poland as well as in several cities in the United States.

Quark has approximately 1,000 employees worldwide.

Market shares

Due to the strong competition between QuarkXPress and InDesign just market shares are always rise to wild speculation and emotional debates. Especially since InDesign mainly Suite is sold as part of the Creative, and thus does not necessarily mean sales market shares, there are no reliable figures on market shares. The last reliable study was carried out in 2004 by Merrill Lynch, which came to the conclusion that QuarkXPress then an eight times as high market share had as Adobe InDesign.

According to Quark, there are over three million legal users of QuarkXPress world.

History of the German branch

To 1993: No German branch, representative office by Prisma GmbH. 1994: Opening of the first German branch in Bietigheim -Bissingen. 1996: Relocation of the German branch to Ludwigsburg. 2003: Relocation of the German branch in Hamburg.