Prepress Technology April 2000
Quark: Layoffs will not delay XPress 5.0
By Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor
Despite laying off a dozen employees, including six software engineers, Quark Inc. said it will not extend the target release date of QuarkXPress 5.0 beyond the end of the year.
The layoffs were part of a reorganization of the 500 employees at Quark's Denver headquarters aimed at focusing efforts on releasing the new version of XPress, the company said.
"One of the reasons we did this was so we could release 5.0 in the near future. The reorganization was needed to enable a clear path to a quick 5.0 shipment," said Mark Lemmons, vice president of strategic development for Quark. "We changed how we are structured internally to better focus on XPress 5.0."
While the layoffs represent only a small fraction of Quark's workforce, the reorganization, which primarily affected the desktop division, was significant, said Lemmons. The organizational changes consolidated redundant and fragmented work in marketing communications and product management.
"This was a move to refocus around XPress and certainly wasn't motivated by cost or downsizing," said Lemmons. "We are putting a clear priority and focus on XPress and the publishing market."
Previously, marketing efforts were made from three separate areas: marketing, corporate communications and public relations, and trade shows and events. These areas were combined into one marketing communications department headed up by Bonnie Turner, who previously was responsible for corporate communications and events.
Quark's team of product managers now will be under the leadership of Juergen Kurz, director of product management, who now will take responsibility for the overall coordination and development of Quark products as an integrated solution.
Slated to ship during the fourth quarter, Quark is looking for the 5.0 version of XPress to help it maintain its market position, touting it as "the 1.0 release of XPress for media-independent publishing."
The next version of XPress represents a change of direction for Quark, including a significant commitment to XML, PostScript, HTML and other emerging formats as a platform for media-independent publishing, said Lemmons.
Quark plans to bundle its avenue.quark Xtensions software free with XPress 5.0, allowing publishers to automatically insert and format XML content in a QuarkXPress document. XPress 5.0 also will make it possible for users to export documents from XPress in PDF format without using Adobe Acrobat Distiller.
Other new features of QuarkXPress 5.0 are designed to make publishers more efficient, such as a tables feature that allows layout artists to organize text and image data in cells in an intuitive interface similar to a spreadsheet, and a layers feature that lets designers isolate items in a document to make them easier to edit and manipulate.