Quark, Inc.
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| Private company | |
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded |
Denver, Colorado, U.S. (1981) |
| Founder |
Tim Gill Mark Pope |
| Headquarters | Denver, Colorado, United States |
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Key people
|
Raymond Schiavone (President and CEO) |
| Owner | Platinum Equity |
| Website | www |
Quark Software Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado) is a privately owned software company which specializes in enterprise publishing software for automating the production of customer communications. The company's original goal was to "create software that would be the platform for publishing", just as quarks are the basis for all matter. The company is best known for its desktop page layout and design software, QuarkXPress, although this has now become secondary to its other products and services.
Quark was founded with $2000 in 1981 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Between 1981 and 1985 their primary products were Word Juggler and Catalyst. Word Juggler was the first word processor on the Apple III. Catalyst was a program that was distributed bundled with the Apple IIe, and allowed users to run floppy-disk based applications from their hard drive. They also attempted a product line called "Quark Peripherals", but the market for storage devices at the time resulted in a huge financial loss.
In March 1987 Quark released QuarkXPress 1.0, which due to its precision quickly gained market share from Aldus Pagemaker. With the release of QuarkXPress 3.0 in 1990, Quark quickly achieved a dominant position in the desktop publishing market and became the standard for desktop publishing. By the end of the 1990s they gathered a market share of around 90%.
In the late 1990s, Quark faced intense criticism for slow innovation cycles, high prices, and a poor response to customer needs. Therefore, many customers welcomed the release of Adobe InDesign in 1999 as a viable alternative. The release of Adobe Creative Suite in 2003, essentially including InDesign with Photoshop and Illustrator, resulted in ongoing market share loss for QuarkXPress.
As a result, under the new leadership of Raymond Schiavone, Quark started to refocus its resources towards the enterprise dynamic publishing market, announcing a new strategy in March 2008.
Quark was founded under the name "Quark Engineering" 1981 by Tim Gill and Mark Pope. In 1986 Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark as CEO and co-owner. In 1990, Mark Pope sold his share of the company to the other partners. In 2000 Tim Gill left Quark and sold all his shares to Ebrahimi.
In keeping with its India focus, Quark appointed Kamar Aulakh, a Quark veteran of Indian origin, as its CEO in February, 2004. In June 2005, Quark informed its employees that Aulakh was no longer with the company.
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Wikipedia