Happy Halloween!

Gavin Drake, Marketing Director for Quark, picked up on our blog post the other day regarding Quark, and he had a correction for us, which we need to explain. In our blog posting, we had included the phrase “come back to Quark” in quotation marks, implying that Quark actually stated these words in their email to us. That was not a direct quote from Quark and we stand corrected. Thank you, Gavin.

Gavin was also nice enough to include the following quote for our readers:

“I’m pleased to say that the way Quark did business in the past is history. Quark has a singular focus on delivering innovative software for its customers and transforming its culture to provide the service, support, and response customers expect. While I’m not sure that the specific phrase you refer to originated from Quark, I share the sentiment of encouraging customers who haven’t looked at QuarkXPress 8 yet, to do so, and who haven’t tried our customer service or free technical support recently to do so. And please let us know what you think.

And as for QuarkXPress 8? Having spoken with some leading printers that typically upgrade due to client demand and are this time upgrading regardless, I’m confident the productivity gains in QuarkXPress 8 justify the upgrade outside of client demand. Thanks for continuing to push us to do better. We appreciate it because it’s what drives us forward.”

I had a personal conversation with Gavin and he is well aware of some of the issues printers and designers have encountered, and he assured me of their focus on the customer, and he mentions some of those items in his quotation above.

Good luck to Quark – we hope QuarkXPress 8 is a huge success. None of us want to be left with only one software vendor. Competition will produce better software across the board.