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Does Quark have the Right Stuff
July 7, 2008
In the last blogs we discussed the original Quark and the right stuff for desktop software adoption. The last question we asked was "Does the new Quark have the right stuff".
Well it is impossible to judge in a short period of time – but here are my gut feelings. There were some brief opening remarks from Quark’s new President and CEO Ray Schiavone. In his remarks I was impressed by his openness and honesty about the dissatisfaction of users with the product, past management and the shift from off shore tech support.
This was a huge departure from previous managements and it reminded me of statements things I heard John Warnock say - which is pretty high praise. I also had a chance to test drive the product. It’s not in vogue to admit these days – but I was a HUGE fan of XPress. It was my favorite product to use and favorite program to train people to use.
I will channel Tom Cruise from “Wheels of Thunder” and say there was nothing I could not do in XPress versions 3.31R5 or 4.11. But versions 5-7 did not impress me much and in fact frustrated me with issues in product code keys, crashes and poor performance.
In the new version the feature sets have actually been reduced to most important and most frequently used features – I like that. The user interface was simplified and I like that too. I am hoping that product code key fiasco and problems with buggy versions are long behind it. But an unanswered issue for me is performance.
I had the chance to test drive XPress 8. But it is really difficult to evaluate the performance because it was running on the state of the art IMac computers which may have been Intel Core 2 Duo machines with 2 Gb drives and running at 3 Ghz or higher. It appeared that the speed rivaled XPress 4.11 - but I am not sure how it would perform on my slower machines, like my 1.8 Ghz dual processor PowerMac or my 1.5 GHz single processor Powerbook.
Right now I am taking a look and see approach. So far I like what I am seeing and hearing from the new management team. They are willing to admit issues and are working to resolve them which is a huge departure from previous teams. I am hoping they are accurate when they say that performance and stability were a top priority and addressed in this version.
Perhaps the toughest question is how much better would XPress have to become to create enough of a value gap for people to shift back to using it. In all honesty - I don’t know. What do you think?
Posted by Howie Fenton on July 7, 2008 | Comments (2)
