Quark CEO suddenly departs, replacement search underway

AppleInsider · June 9, 2005 10:51AM

Quark chief executive Kamar Aulakh, who was credited with transforming the privately-held firm's strategic direction, has abruptly left the company.

In a prepared statement to the press, the Denver, Col.-based company "announced that effective immediately, Kamar Aulakh is no longer with the company."

Quark said it has initiated an external search for a new CEO and has enlisted the resources of executive search firm Christian & Timbers to do so.

In the interim, Linda Chase, senior vice president of commerce product development, has been appointed by the Board of Directors as acting president of the company.

Chase brings to the table over 20 years experience in the publishing industry and has lead the QuarkCommerce business unit since 1998.

News of the departure first surfaced on the Macworld UK website.

Reasons behind Aulakh's departure have not been disclosed.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

corvette · June 9, 2005 10:56AM

I don't care as long as Quark 7.0 is x86 compatible and runs faster than a 6.5 does on Tiger right now, being one of the slowest apps on Tiger.

aquamac · June 9, 2005 11:16AM

Anyone want to take bets on how many years it will take Quark to port over to native X83 code?

\ Thank god for Rosetta.

Quark needs new leadership. With no real inovations since Quark 4, InDesign is blowing them away.

marmotton · June 9, 2005 11:44AM

Quote:

Originally posted by AquaMac

Anyone want to take bets on how many years it will take Quark to port over to native X83 code? \ Thank god for Rosetta.

Quark needs new leadership. With no real inovations since Quark 4, InDesign is blowing them away.

Amen!

I'm surprised he lasted that long. Their board of director must be of very poor quality. The guy had absolutely no strategic skills...

satchmo · June 9, 2005 11:58AM

Quote:

Originally posted by marmotton

Amen!

I'm surprised he lasted that long. Their board of director must be of very poor quality. The guy had absolutely no strategic skills...

That, or the board wasn't willing to let him implement his vision.

Either way, he probably left a sinking ship.

I'm a long time Quark user, but a few weeks ago tried InDesign on a real project. It was so easy to pick up. Our IT department wants to switch to InDesign because for $1000 you get the whole CS suite instead of just a single copy of Quark Xpress.

macfandave · June 9, 2005 12:03PM

Quote:

Originally posted by AppleInsider

Reasons behind Aulakh's departure have not been disclosed.

They don't need to be because they are obvious: Because he sucked!

screed · June 9, 2005 1:10PM

This was the gentlemen that berated his audience about the death of Apple and told them to switch over to Windows, right? That guy?

Or was that Ebrahimi?

Yah, it was the latter

jll · June 9, 2005 3:06PM

Quote:

Originally posted by AquaMac

Anyone want to take bets on how many years it will take Quark to port over to native X83 code? \ Thank god for Rosetta.

Quark needs new leadership. With no real inovations since Quark 4, InDesign is blowing them away.

I've seen an early version of 7, and they are actually starting to use Mac OS X technologies which IMO means that the transition to x86 will be quick.

davebarnes · June 9, 2005 3:20PM

Can you say: "sexual harassment"?

rok · June 9, 2005 4:43PM

pity gill isn't in charge anymore. sure, he had his problems, too, but he is what made quark the giant it was for that decade-plus.

davebarnes · June 9, 2005 5:35PM

Quote:

Originally posted by rok

pity gill isn't in charge anymore.

Not only is Tim Gill not in charge, but he sold his entire share of the company to Fred over 5+ years ago.

All of Tim's money and time are spent here: http://www.gillfoundation.org/

sunilraman · June 10, 2005 12:12AM

in deference and i apologise to designers whose bread-and-butter is Quark, but....

fuck Quark.

there, i said it.

long live [adobe-macromedia], inc.

smart bets on multimedia software today essentially involve Adobe and Apple software. particularly with transition to fat binaries for powerpc/intel.

i sympathise with crazy deadlines, mad clients, dumbass coworkers, etc, but i strongly urge sales/advertising/marketing/multimedia production people to place their workflow bets more towards Adobe-Apple. forget about quark, and move away from freehand to illustrator, quark to indesign, would be my humble suggestion.

edit:

also, definitely check out Keynote2 if you're doing a lot of presentation work for clients. it kicks powerpoint booty hardcore.

also, once you get your mind around Pages, you could crank out a lot of stuff for 'lower-end' clients fast, rather than wrangle with indesign/illustrator/quark (i'm gonna get flamed for this, i can feel it)

sunilraman · June 10, 2005 12:20AM

btw, looks like the bayArea gang is back at it:

in alphabetical order,

Adobe, Apple, Intel

LONG LIVE BAY AREA TECH & MULTIMEDIA..!

<off topic>

i wonder how Caltrain is doing nowadays. have they electrified the line yet or what

</off topic>

xype · June 10, 2005 1:12AM

Well, that's certainly news that matters.

I guess he had a bet going with the board that he quits his job the moment Apple will switch to x86...

admactanium · June 10, 2005 3:30AM

no love lost here from me for quark. evidently, the ceo had testicular cancer.

elbay · June 10, 2005 5:13AM

Did he finally click that Quark is in major trouble? Or was he just a crap CEO? No doubt Tim Gill saw this day coming when Adobe first announced Indesign

(Quark's demise).

Mark my words, Quark is headed down the gurgler, and boy, do they deserve it. Just ask anybody who has spent their money with this company. Two CEO's in just about as many years. An archaic interface, the fact that Indesign is kicking their ass.

Like the previous poster said, you can buy the entire Adobe Creative Suite for less than the price of Quark. (At least in New Zealand).

sunilraman · June 10, 2005 8:06AM

damn, there really is no love lost here (on this thread) for quark

cubedcompanies · June 10, 2005 12:11PM

Adobe with the win. Quark sucks. The king is dead... has been.

nothing to see here >>>> moving along.

sunilraman · June 10, 2005 7:58PM

Quote:

Originally posted by cubedcompanies

Adobe with the win. Quark sucks. The king is dead... has been.

nothing to see here >>>> moving along.

fuck me.... i thought i'd see at least 1 quark loyalist on this thread, but they're nowhere to be seen

i've never really used quark

about 8 months ago while freelancing in the web department of a major cinema chain in australia they asked me to do some print work. opened up a quark file (we had to use mac os 9

) and i was like, wtf?

so i just did the whole 300dpi print piece (had 1 or 2 gb of ram on the dualie-g4

) in potatochop, dumped the .tif (edit: actually i gave him the PSD) onto a cd and the printer dude took care of the rest.

thank god i didn't have to touch quark, and they haven't got inDesign yet... so adobe and photoshop totally saved my ass that day. sweet.

if i had to use quark or do color separations or anything i would be soo screwed. but pure digital printing thingy with adobe photoshop, and inDesign for the hardcore print people, yeah. R.I.P. quark. not sure if they'll deserve a cemetery plot next to the PowerPC though

rok · June 11, 2005 7:13PM

a LOT of designers/prod artists i knew hated quark LONG before the first rumors of k2 (indesign's pre-release name, as it was also dubbed the "quark killer"). we all grudgingly used it despite its large price, non-standard interface quirks, and umpteen incremental updates, because what else were we going to use? pagemaker? that was fine for low-run newsletters, but it couldn't do half of what quark coudl at the time. word? god help us all.

half the people i know who have jumped on the indesign bandwagon hated indesign 1 as well, but we were all like "well, at least we're on the upgrade path... indesign 2 has to be better than this." and it was, just enough to give us hope. indesign cs does everything i need it to, and indesign cs2 just polishes some rough edges. and god bless, the price differential per seat is great, especially for students (remember, quark only started offering educational discounts THIS PAST YEAR).

quark, like any monopoly, has gotten complacent, and figured that their installed newspaper/magazine market was too entrenched to ever leave. while that's true in many places (you can't just shut down the toronto star for a week to upgrade), it also makes them reluctant to do ANYthing, including upgrade to quark 6 or 7. i mean, at that point, you're asking yourself "well, we need to upgrade now, we have the budget, if i am going to upgrade anyway, why not really make a change?"

there was a day i could operate quark 4 in my sleep. i haven't touched in two years.

Quark CEO suddenly departs, replacement search underway

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