sburns

Interesting times back then, but Steve Jobs had nothing to do with InDesign's surging ahead of Quark. I was working in the printing industry during those times when it was a good industry to be working in. Quark was the dominate player as it was just the better tool, even if they lagged behind on porting over to OS X. Indesign wasn't very good, just a rework of Pagemaker, which was pretty basic page layout. It didn't become decent or useful until around the time Adobe started to release it as part of the Creative Suite, but at this point they were practically giving it away because no one wanted to use it (well some did). Well the industry took a down turn and this is when costs were cut and budgets were scrutinized. For the cost of 1 Quark upgrade you could upgrade to Creative Suite (which was Photoshop, Illustrator, and included Indsign). Everyone needed Photoshop and Illustrator anyway so the choice seemed pretty practical. I saw an overnight shift from Quark to Indesign files, and we dropped most of our Quark licenses and kept 1 active for the odd client. At the same time the rise of PDF files for proofing, workflow, and deliverable's (instead of native collected files) were on the rise. Indesign was  better at creating them.

Quark just priced themselves out of the business, lagged behind on quality PDF creation and luckily Adobe's bundling helped the industry move along.