Printers, graphic designers, and advertising agencies received a funny email the other day, inviting us to “come back to Quark” and try version 8. Thousands of us in this field have had a lot of laughs over this one, and here’s why:

Years ago, Quark was the only game in town. If you wanted the best software, you ran Quark. Quark was to graphic designers what Windows is to the PC; you didn’t know a graphic designer (or a printer, or an agency) without it. It had all the ‘cool tools’ and saved you hours of time.

Then a funny thing happened- Quark quit listening to its customers. Some of us were complaining about print drivers (it was difficult to set up a new printer); others didn’t like the way you created a PDF (one page at a time); and the list went on and on. But we persevered.

And then came InDesign by Adobe. Since it was an Adobe product, most of us tried it – and we liked it. It looked like Quark and felt like Quark, except Adobe listened to you. They created updates fast, and patches faster. Since they owned Acrobat, creating a PDF was a cinch! Installing it was easy, and anyone could load a printer. Over the next several years, Quark’s market share eroded, until it finally got to the point last week where we got the email.

Well, it’s too little, too late for us. So many of our clients have switched to InDesign, we don’t need to buy Quark 8 right now. We have the latest version of InDesign, though, and we like it. Our few clients who only run Quark are more than happy to save the file down a version.

Now, we’ll end up buying Quark 8, but this time we can wait for all the bugs to be worked out, and it isn’t dire that we get it right now – and that is going to cost Quark a lot of money.

The moral of the story? It’s the same old story, but it’s the one that really matters: Listen to your clients, or you may find yourself without them.