5 ms·

I think it can still be done. Corel's options for vector and photo editors still get business, and quark express competed with indesign for a long time (assumi

I think it can still be done. Corel's options for vector and photo editors still get business, and quark express competed with indesign for a long time (assuming the reason it died was because they failed to keep innovating, not because indesign's position is insurmountable). There are yet tons of video editing software options to compete with Premiere. When I look at the free/open source solutions (gimp, scribus, inkscape), what I see are tools made by engineers. I think if you injected in a good measure of input from designers and usability experts it'd go a long way towards being solid competition.

jonah 15y ago
QuarkXPress existed WAAAY before InDesign came out. It was the 800 pound gorilla in the publishing world for many years. InDesign was the insurgent and KILLED Quark in short order - primarily because Quark had become such a legacy piece of junk and couldn't keep up with the times or the much more modern InDesign.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Before InDesign killed Quark, Quark killed PageMaker. Going on how long it's been, i think InDesign is due for a killing by now.
- bonaldi 15y ago
  tldr: It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't, because they were milking their cash cow hard and wilfully ignoring the future. Quark committed suicide: they outsourced virtually all of their R&D, leaving none of the people who had built the previous versions employed. They ignored their users, assuming they were captive, for more than a decade. They also ignored the move to OS X for literally years, leaving (mainly Mac-based) users to choose between staying on OS 9 and moving to Windows and buying all new hardware. Adobe came along at just the right moment with InDesign -- ran on OS X, best-of-class print tools -- and you could almost hear the stampede. A real pity, too, as InDesign has a horrorshow UI, while XPress's "make boxes, put things in them" metaphor is exactly how DTP should be done.
  - jonah 15y ago
    > It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't. e.g. Microsoft, MySpace, etc. etc. I'd argue didn't and couldn't are essentially one-and-the-same.
galfarragem 15y ago
Adobe software is just too powerful to be replaced. It's like Autodesk. You can do almost everything there. This flexibility (and still competing with/being the most powerful tool in that niche) makes it almost impossible to defeat. Of course adobe is not perfect (very far from that) but their software is being developed for several years, is not something a startup makes in some months. Of course is possible, look at the example of Sketchup, there was dozens of great 3d modeling tools and they gained a good market position innovating where others grasp: usability for newbies. But they had to be great on this, good usability wouldn´t be enough..

jonah 15y ago

QuarkXPress existed WAAAY before InDesign came out. It was the 800 pound gorilla in the publishing world for many years. InDesign was the insurgent and KILLED Quark in short order - primarily because Quark had become such a legacy piece of junk and couldn't keep up with the times or the much more modern InDesign.

philwelch 15y ago
Before InDesign killed Quark, Quark killed PageMaker. Going on how long it's been, i think InDesign is due for a killing by now.
bonaldi 15y ago
tldr: It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't, because they were milking their cash cow hard and wilfully ignoring the future. Quark committed suicide: they outsourced virtually all of their R&D, leaving none of the people who had built the previous versions employed. They ignored their users, assuming they were captive, for more than a decade. They also ignored the move to OS X for literally years, leaving (mainly Mac-based) users to choose between staying on OS 9 and moving to Windows and buying all new hardware. Adobe came along at just the right moment with InDesign -- ran on OS X, best-of-class print tools -- and you could almost hear the stampede. A real pity, too, as InDesign has a horrorshow UI, while XPress's "make boxes, put things in them" metaphor is exactly how DTP should be done.
- jonah 15y ago
  > It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't. e.g. Microsoft, MySpace, etc. etc. I'd argue didn't and couldn't are essentially one-and-the-same.

galfarragem 15y ago

Adobe software is just too powerful to be replaced. It's like Autodesk. You can do almost everything there. This flexibility (and still competing with/being the most powerful tool in that niche) makes it almost impossible to defeat. Of course adobe is not perfect (very far from that) but their software is being developed for several years, is not something a startup makes in some months. Of course is possible, look at the example of Sketchup, there was dozens of great 3d modeling tools and they gained a good market position innovating where others grasp: usability for newbies. But they had to be great on this, good usability wouldn´t be enough..