Feature Article

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

[Viewpoint] The Right and Wrong of Quark and Adobe Strategies

By Eric Kuhnen, Focal Partners, special to The Content Wrangler

Quark and Adobe have been after each for a long time, and there are metaphors aplenty to overlay this conflict. First, it was attrition warfare between QuarkXPress and PageMaker, which embroiled Adobe after its 1995 acquisition of Aldus Corporation. QuarkXPress won out when Adobe realized that PageMaker’s software was a Gordian Knot of entangled code. Adobe employed the so-called “Alexandrian Solution” by simply cotton the knot; that is, by jettisoning the PageMaker product to build a new product, InDesign, from the ground up.

Next, it was Greco-Roman wrestling between QuarkXPress versus InDesign. By the time InDesign debuted in 1999, QuarkXPress was the industry standard for every publishing related activity. Thus commenced a barrage of throws, arm drags, bear hugs, and headlocks by QuarkXPress in an effort to pin the upstart InDesign to the mat. But fate intervened. Adobe and Quark launched new versions of their respective products in the same week of January 2002. The key difference? InDesign 2.0 supported MacOS X; QuarkXPress did not. This oversight is reminiscent of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney in which the young Rulon Gardner exploited a momentary lapse in heavily favored Aleksander Karelin’s defense to win the gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling. Similarly, InDesign escaped the clutches of QuarkXPress, and began a steady assault against its once-unbeatable opponent. In 2007, Quark CEO Ray Schiavone conceded defeat in a September 2007 interview withPariah S. Burke, editor of QuarkVSInDesign.com.

Now, it’s “The Road Not Taken” as InDesign expands within the context of Adobe Creative Suite 3 while QuarkXPress morphs into a component of Quark’s Dynamic Publishing Solution.  What distinguishes the underlying strategies of these two products is the absence or presence of a content management system (CMS). And like that favorite theme of Frost and Peck, each company asserts that it’s following the less-traveled road.

The problem is they’re both taking roads most traveled because of their respective stances towards integrated content management systems, and I’ll show you how after looking at their respective strategies. Let’s start with Adobe.

Adobe: Everything but the CMS

Adobe’s entire strategy is to engage its customers at the boundary between users and their ideas and information. To that end, Adobe offers a line of creative, business and mobile software and services for creating, managing, delivering, and “engaging” with compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media. (NOTE: I pulled that tidy little summary from Adobe’s 2007 Form 10-K on file with the US Government’s Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC].) And it’s a pretty long line, too. According to its SEC filing, Adobe sells 39 products classified as “Creative Solutions”, 8 classified as “Knowledge Worker Products”, 14 classified as “Enterprise and Developer Solutions Products”, 5 products aimed at “Mobile and Device Solutions”, and a further 24 products serving platform, PostScript, and print-publishing sectors. Of the 90 products produced by Adobe, three claim to interface well with a CMS (Graphics Server, Acrobat Connect, and RoboHelp), and one claims to compete with other web content management systems (Adobe Contribute).  Finally, the CFO, Mark Garrett, came from EMC/Documentum, but that’s as far as Adobe’s CMS interests extend. Beyond that, the effort to deliver software and services for creating, managing, and delivering compelling content does not include offering a content management system per se.

Adobe hopes it’s on to something here. It has turned that line of products into a circle. The circle circumscribes a set of components that Adobe has no interest in building itself, such as printers, operating systems, and content management systems. A user exploring a line of creative thought intersects the circle at the Adobe product employed to express that thought on its way to the medium within the circle for storing that thought. In this way, Adobe can focus on being the means by which all creative thought is expressed without suffering the distractions of competitors (like Microsoft) who try to sell something on the circle and something inside the circle at the same time.

Another plausible explanation is that building and selling a content management system is hard work in a business with shrinking margins. After Open Text, there are no independent enterprise content management vendors. Smaller vendors exist (consult the exhaustive list of vendors compiled by CMS Matrix) but they have little chance to grow beyond the niche markets they serve. Adobe may thinking that so many companies have trod the path of the CMS that it’s simply wiser to exchange curiosity (in building a CMS) for prudence by leaving the CMS to someone else.

Whether or not Adobe has the right strategy is the point at issue in the market because Quark (not to mention Microsoft) is bundling a CMS with its offering. So let’s look at Quark.

Quark: Again with the Publishing Revolution

Quark’s present strategy is to give customers seamless, productive control over the creation, management, publication and delivery of creative content.  To deliver on this promise, they’ve woven XML into all of their products to allow for much greater automation and to deal more effectively with components of media-independent information. Also, they’ve either partnered with XML content providers, such as In.vision Research (makes the Xpress Author plug-in to Microsoft Word), or they’ve built integrations to some of Adobe’s own products, such as InDesign and InCopy. To prove it all works, they’ve built the Quark Dynamic Publishing Solution (DPS), which accepts input from content creation tools like QuarkXPress and Xpress Author, prepares the content for publication with the Quark Transformation Engine, and spits out rendered content with QuarkXPress Server. The key component that differentiates Quark’s approach from Adobe’s strategy is the presence of the Alfresco CMS, an open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system. With Alfresco in the mix, Quark can also manage the lifecycle of the created content so that customers can improve information quality, increase efficient content reuse, and drive down the overall costs to produce content for new and existing markets. All of these additional benefits derive from the decision to include a CMS in the product strategy.

If the phrase “Dynamic Publishing Solution” sounds familiar, it’s because the publishing revolution going on at Quark already happened at PTC/Arbortext two years ago. Back then it was called “dynamic enterprise publishing” or simply “dynamic publishing”, but the message was the same: “with our content and process system married to our authoring and publishing system, you will enjoy lower costs, greater accuracy, up-to-date information, and happy customers.” In time, the revolutionaries found their way to Quark (five of the senior team, including the CEO, are ex-Arbortext) and viola! Revolution! Again.

Quark and Adobe: Roads Traveled Often

To follow the strategic road less traveled, you can’t take the paths chosen by Adobe or Quark. Adobe asserts its uniqueness by choosing to omit the CMS from its product strategy. As I showed earlier, there is some logic in that thinking, but it’s misguided. Here’s why: the CMS is the key to efficient content creation, which is what enterprises want. Consider Adobe’s chief competitor, Microsoft. Look at the cool stuff Adobe touts and you’ll find Microsoft products as alternatives. I’m thinking of AIR versus Silverlight; Buzzword versus Office Live. However, Adobe says “no CMS” and Microsoft says “SharePoint” and they’ve promoted SharePoint to become the platform around which people collaborate and manage the content they create. Since enterprise customers understand the cost savings that an ECM offers, they give Microsoft a chance to pitch other content creation tools, tools which happen to compete with Adobe’s tools. Adobe, lacking a CMS component, cannot compete effectively with Microsoft, and so they look elsewhere; i.e., the SMB market. But, there’s nothing new in that strategy; Adobe has been in the SMB market for years. So, Adobe cuts itself out of the Enterprise market by asserting its unique, non-CMS approach. And that is the well traveled road ...

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Filed under: Content Management : Dynamic Content : Technological Innovation

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