Quark "Parts Ways" with CEO

[Stephen Owades]

The news stories thus far (http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1759,1826049,00.asp) don't say much about what's actually going on, but Kamar Aulakh, the CEO of Quark who succeeded Fred Ebrahimi, has left the company. Whether he's jumped or been pushed isn't clear. The interim successor will be Linda Chase, who has been (and will remain) senior vice president of commerce product development, and the company has engaged an executive search firm to find a new CEO.

I'm sure that the success of Adobe's Creative Suite is making things harder for Quark these days. When Microsoft introduced their Office suite, converting users of Word or Excel into users of the whole suite, it had a major impact on Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect--both because of the integration among Office products and because those users now had all the Office products on their systems. Similarly, InDesign is surely benefiting from the Creative Suite bundling that gets it onto machines that may formerly have been running only Photoshop or Illustrator. How Quark can respond to this isn't clear, and probably isn't clear to them either. The sort of increased focus on customer satisfaction that they've been talking about in recent years (see the press release) is a good start. But I hope that the suggestions that Quark has been too product-focused in the past don't indicate that they're planning to put fewer resources into making major improvements in the core product.