Our news includes some details about the launch of QuarkXPress 7.0, but I have to ask if this is at all significant to the desktop publishing world at this point. Most–maybe even all–publishers I work with have made the move to Adobe InDesign. Some publishers are holding on to a few licenses of QuarkXPress for older books and products that might need to be updated, but all new products are being done using InDesign. Moreover, Adobe Creative Suite, which combines InDesign, Illustrator, PhotoShop, and other products, is simply too attractive an offering with very attractive pricing. Quark has nothing comparable to counter with.
For larger publishers, there are also very viable workgroup options with InDesign, which wasn’t true a few years ago. The combination of InDesign with InCopy for writers and editors is gaining traction, and there solutions such as K4 from Managing Editor and Smart Connection Enterprise from Woodwing for larger groups. These systems are often replacing Quark’s QPS solution as the publishers drop QuarkXPress for InDesign.
Quark 6.0 took forever to come out. Quark 7.0 took forever to come out. In the meantime, InDesign has really taken hold. So I have my doubts that Quark can overcome this.
Finally, there is a cautionary tale in all of this. Quark was famously arrogant in its heyday, and did a lot to alienate customers. When I wrote about the movement to InDesign for The Seybold Report in December 2004 (subscription required), industry maven Kate Binder said, “Never discount people’s absolute, bitter hatred of Quark the company. It’s genuinely a factor.”
Category: Publishing & media (Page 46 of 53)
As this news item reminded us today, vendors are gearing up for the launch of Vista and Office 12. We are already seeing vendors announcing support for both in various ways, but this will continue to build to a deluge of announcements over the next 6 months. XPS (XML Paper Specification) is one of the new pieces of Vista and Office 12 that bears paying attention to. While it is not likely to displace Adobe’s PDF (certainly not in the near term at least), it will certainly be used instead of PDF for certain applications. What those applications will be is something worth thinking about. There is more info on XPS from Microsoft here, including links to the specification, developer blogs etc.
Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.
I couldn’t resist buying an Intel iMac and installing Windows on it. It really was incredibly simple to add Windows. I’m not sure how I will actually use both OSs yet, but it occurred to me that in the often heavily mixed Mac and PC creative and publishing environments, a few Macs running both operating systems could be very useful for smoothing out some workflows in potentially non-disruptive ways. I’ll let others figure out if this is the case, but one issue they will need to think through is whether to format their Windows partition with NTFS (more secure and reliable) or FAT (more compatible).
Frank does a great job of filtering the news and getting it out to our readers. We get several press releases a day, and on busy days it can be a dozen or more. When one of our conferences or a trade show like AIIM is coming up, the flood of news can be pretty overwhelming. To make it more challenging, most of the news ends up in our email in-boxes–along with dozens of other legitimate email and, some days, hundreds of spam. I have pretty good spam filtering, but sometimes it overflags, and a vendor email will end up in my junk mail folder. Every week or so, I go through the spam and flag these email addresses for my white list.
So I have a proposal for vendors. Come up with an RSS feed for your news, and I will subscribe to it. A few of you already do this, and I have subscribed, but most of you don’t. So add an RSS feed for your press releases and let us know–by email of course. 😉
While you are thinking about it, you could consider a more general RSS feed for other elements of your Web site–events, new documents, and so forth. I am sure your customers would appreciate it too.
Some of you may have seen the press release from us yesterday announcing our new consulting practice focused on the needs of commercial and corporate publishers. Of course this is not a new area for us – Bill Trippe especially, has long been very active in the publishing space – but rather a dramatic expansion of our activities in an area we know well. It is great to be working with Steve Paxhia again, who will be running this practice. It will also be great to be working more regularly with Gene Gable, Thad McIlroy, Bill Rosenblatt, and Dale Waldt. Here is a description of the practice. We’ve already launched the practice, but most of our team and our partners will also be at Gilbane San Francisco, where we have a lot of content relevant to publishers including (but not limited to!) the new Automated Publishing track.
For Immediate Release:
3/28/06
Industry experts Gable, McIlroy, and Rosenblatt join Paxhia, Trippe, Laplante, and Ciarlone to form uniquely powerful team of thought leaders
Contacts:
Steve Paxhia
617.497.9443 ext 214
steve@gilbane.com
Mary Laplante
617.497.9443 ext 212
mary@gilbane.com
Cambridge, MA, March 28, 2006. The Gilbane Report announced a new consulting practice focused on the needs of both commercial and enterprise publishing professionals. Gilbane has assembled a team of industry leading thinkers and doers who have many years experience in deploying technology to create profits. Questions they can help you answer include:
- Where could publishing technology have the greatest impact on our organization’s profits?
- Should our organization incorporate new technologies like wikis and blogs into our processes and product offerings?
- What are the best practices for developing products to be published in multiple media formats?
- How can our organization develop new electronic products derived from our existing content?
- How can we efficiently produce and manage customized versions of our products?
- Are our current technology platform and vendors the most cost effective?
- What are the best technology choices for the new project that we are starting?
“I am thrilled to have publishing and software industry veteran and colleague Steve Paxhia join us to run this important practice.” said Frank Gilbane, “We have been providing advice on publishing strategies and technology since the mid-eighties, but Steve brings a vision and focus of what commercial publishers and enterprises can, and should, be doing with publishing technology that will dramatically expand our ability to manage a broad range of large projects immediately”.
The Gilbane team’s expertise ranges from very strategic to cutting edge technical. While technology projects and decisions can often be complex, our goal is to help our clients clarify the key success factors and then empower their organizations to make the best decisions. Members of the Gilbane team include:
- Steve Paxhia, Vice President & General Manager, Publishing Strategy and Technology Consulting Practice
- Mary Laplante, Vice President Consulting Services
- Bill Trippe, Senior Consultant
- Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Consultant
In addition to our own team we have partnered with noted publishing industry experts:
- Bill Rosenblatt, President, GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
- Gene Gable, President, Gene Gable Industries
- Thad McIlroy, President, Arcadia House
Meet this powerful team of experts at Gilbane San Francisco, in the Automated Publishing Track of the Content Technology conference or in the Enterprise Digital Rights Management conference. Contact Steve Paxhia for an appointment.
About Gilbane Report Consulting
The Gilbane Report serves the content technology and publishing community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report also administers the Content Technology Works program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Digital Media, a Division of Open Text, Astoria Software, ClearStory Systems (OTCBB:INSS), Context Media (Oracle, NASDAQ: ORCL), Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), IBM (NYSE:IBM), Idiom, Mark Logic, Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX), SDL International (London Stock Exchange:SDL), Vasont Systems, Vignette (NASDAQ:VGN), and WebSideStory (NASDAQ:WSSI). https://gilbane.com
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Sarah O’Keefe from Scriptorium noted and commented on a great discussion of DITA and DocBook by Norm Walsh, the guru of DocBook. Norm was a featured speaker at last week’s DITA 2006 conference. Norm’s discussion is readable and lucid, and if you have been wondering about this question for a while, Norm’s post is required reading.
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