Is Quark loosing the edge in Education?


Quark may have seemed to have been hard to work with in the past. They seem anal to some in their approach to licensing. They have required both individual license codes and physical dongles to protect their licenses. This has been a hassle to some. The dongles are gone but they are becoming more difficult even so? Are they just not keeping up with the times? Or, are they just trying to make money?

In many ways both Quark and Adobe have been good to education. If you look at Adobe's educational price for InDesign CS on Apple's Education Store website it is about $700. But, they offer an single user upgrade price of $170. Quark Express is $900, on Apple's Education Store site but they offer a single unit educational price of $520 (if called directly for single copies) and (on their own site) 8 unit or more lab-packs to educational institutions for $185 per unit or ($145 as an upgrade from Quark 4.x). When ordering from this link (Quark) be sure to read all the fine print! The information you need is there even if it does not jump out at you.

So far, Kudos for Quark? Not stellar Kudos, but they seem to be in the ballpark.

But, as Paul Harvey would say, "now for the rest of the story!" Adobe is much more generous to educational users than Apple's Education Store pricing if approached directly. Quark's approach however so far has been to hold firm at published prices. So generous is Adobe that their price for their whole suite of products (including PhotoShop, Illustrator etc.) is less than the cost of just Quark's desktop publishing software alone. And, Adobe will supply software to students for such discounted prices!

Quark will not do that. Indeed their student price is $415 per student! Why does this matter? It matters because SJSU and many other educational institutions have laptop initiatives that are moving in the direction of requiring every student to supply her or his own computer. The hand writing is on the wall for computer labs as we know them! How can you tell a student that he/she must buy a $415 piece of software in order to take one class on layout and design?

Simple, you can't! So, as educational institutions are moving in the direction of requiring students to buy laptops and loading those laptops with software, Quark is lagging behind, again. By holding fast to lab oriented pricing Quark may be headed for the door at educational institutions. InDesign is much cheaper and Adobe is more willing to bend. Organizations like the School of Journalism at SJSU are being forced out of the Quark camp. Adobe is welcoming them in with open arms, open and very generous arms!

Posted: Wed - October 15, 2003 at 01:18 PM      

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