Adobe: InDesign Now Gaining on Quark


Adobe Systems is claiming that its InDesign desktop publishing application is now making serious inroads into QuarkXPress's traditional market dominance, according to a story at ZDNet.

As Quark prevaricates on a release date for XPress 6.0, its OS X-native version currently under development, InDesign 2.0 has been the only option for publishing professionals working in OS X.

Quark has typically owned around 90% of the page layout software market, with Adobe's PageMaker for both Mac and Windows making barely a dent. It was restricted in many instances to the non-professional market and sells for considerably less than XPress. However, PageMaker does not provide as much absolute control over typesetting as XPress.

InDesign 1.0 was meant to be a Quark-killer, but did not make the impression on the pro DTP market Adobe had hoped. However, Adobe's rapid development of InDesign 2.0 for OS X, released early this year, as well its dominant Photoshop and Illustrator, meant that Mac pro publishers had a reasonably strong suite of tools to work with in OS X.

The ZDNet article quotes one switcher who moved from XPress to InDesign due to Quark's "luke-warm" support for OS X. However, printers themselves could be reduce acceptance of InDesign, rather than any flaw in the software itself. The printing industry has long been accustomed to receiving master files in Quark and outputting them in PostScript. Far fewer print shops will accept jobs assembled with InDesign.

Despite Quark's continued dominance, Adobe says they are in the market "for the long haul."

Analysis: As Apple announced a special G4/InDesign bundle at a saving of $700 recently, this will give a InDesign a major boost. Users may well give InDesign a serious work out on a new G4 which they otherwise wouldn't have done. But Adobe needs to leap ahead of XPress feature-wise and avoid MS's famous iterative approach if it wants to gain a real chunk of Quark's domain.