Re: Why IS Quark Dragging its feet?
Originally posted by faustofernos
The one thing that nobody talks about, or discusses, is WHY such a wealthy company can't come up with OSX version of its ONLY software application.
You commonly see following in companies that have several big corporate clients...
A price structure based towards corporate/professional (perhaps prosumer) that price gouges because these customers can write it off as a business expense.
A payroll structure based on commissioned sales and hand-holding for such clients.
In short- more spent on directed marketing, than Research and Development.
When Canon the camera company developed desktop copiers and laser printer technology, you saw something similar happening. A very affordable low maintenance product that in addition to giving people access to their own copier for the first time, also attracted the old type of high margin profit customer, corporate middle management that didn't have time to change the toner on their copier. So you saw a lot of payroll dedicated to coddling that dee[ pocket customer, that at the same time, tried to sell up the people that bought the affordable model.
I can't totally fault the model-- if Quark had not bothered to give free seminars way back when, a lot of people may never have realized it could work circles around PageMaker for example. But once that workforce is entrenched, it is difficult to redistribute development funds, as long as the sales force keeps up their end of the bargain, they stayed.
That is why most of us got phone calls asking the rather obvious question why we had not bought Quark 5, instead of a cheaper email telling us when the product we might actually want (ready for OS X) would be ready.
Quark is finding its fat cat customers have IP departments that are Wintel based, and that it has a better chance of competing in the Wintel market, where Pagemaker, which it can easily beat, is still a majority platform. They see more growth there, for the business model they are presently using, one heavy in sales dweebs and short on coders.
On the Mac side, the competition is harder, independant sorts that have less chance of being coddled by a personal sales rep instead of results.
