"This is a case study on how to attack an established product," says NPD analyst Christopher Swenson, commenting on Adobe's attack on Quark in an interesting Business 2.0 article by Mark Borden. The opening for Adobe was equally big, though: "Users contend that after QuarkXPress 4.1 was released in 1999, the software remained virtually unchanged for the next four years." That same year, Adobe released its initial version of InDesign -- which was buggy at first but quickly corrected. "We wanted to send a message that we were addressing issues aggressively," says Adobe's Mark Hilton (i.e., unlike those other guys). The difference between Adobe and Quark became still more pronounced when Apple introduced its new OSX platform in 2002. Adobe was ready with an OSX-compatible version of its software, while Quark "released QuarkXPress 5.0 on Apple's already obsolete OS 9 platform." It was 16 months before Quark was out with QuarkXPress 6.0, an OSX-compatible version, and by then "Adobe had already moved to exploit the popularity of its other products by packaging InDesign with Photoshop and Illustrator in a $1,200 bundle called Creative Suite." According to NPD, "InDesign handily outpaced QuarkXPress in the first five months of this year, capturing about three-quarters of all stand-alone units sold." It probably won't be easy for Quark to re-gain its footing: "The minute you switch over to InDesign, it's probably permanent," says Henri Lucas of UCLA's department of design and media arts." [Cool News]