For what its worth, I worked on the InDesign team during the InDesign 2.0 - CS timeframe, and my boss at Adobe had worked for a long time at Quark. He was very knowledgable about Quark's code.
During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen.
There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant.
I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines.
InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster.
I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation.
I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.
As a side note, I always wondered if the Creative Suite product offering (which bundled ID with photoshop) was just hype or also really got people (especially students) to just forget about Quark. That seemed to happen around the same time, give or take some years of overlapp.
And things got even worse for Quark when, in 2003, you
could get InDesign as part of the newly introduced
Creative Suite Bundle, which as a publisher or graphic
designer, you would have probably bought anyway for
Photoshop and Illustrator. You were basically getting
InDesign for free—it was a Trojan horse in the bundle box,
and I think it really sealed the deal for people on the
fence about the switch.
During that time period, he repeatedly asserted that Quark would never be able to produce an OS X/Intel version. He believed that there were too many MacOS/PPC specific optimizations, and that the code was so difficult to modify that it would never happen.
There were also a non-trivial number of top people from Quark working on the InDesign team at that time. My impression was that Quark was a pretty unpleasant place to work, and that many of the best people left long before InDesign became dominant.
I think the article is right that Adobe tried harder to win over customers during this period. From a technical perspective, however, I think this was a classic story of an old product, architected with older technologies and for slower machines, being outpaced by a product architected with newer technologies and for faster machines.
InDesign's internal architecture is the most robust, extensible desktop application architecture I ever worked with. But it was quite heavy compared to quark's, and initially that caused performance problems. But in the end, faster machines overcame the weight of the architecture (as well as optimizations which were facilitated by cleaner code), and enabled Adobe to innovate faster.
I think you see this same kind of phenomenon with something like the Nokia/iOS transition. At first, iOS seemed to have fewer features, be slower, and require excessive hardware. But pretty quickly the hardware outpaced the architecture, and the power of the underlying architecture enabled vastly more innovation.
I suspect Quark was doomed whether they outsourced their engineers or not.