Last week, it was announced that Platinum Equity had acquired Quark Software Inc. Platinum Equity is a global firm specialising in the merger, acquisition and operation of companies that provide services and solutions to customers in a broad range of business markets, including information technology, telecommunications, logistics, metals services, manufacturing and distribution. Since its founding in 1995, Platinum Equity has completed more than 115 acquisitions.
Based in Denver, Colorado, Quark provides a set of software applications targeted at creative professionals and the enterprise dynamic publishing market. These tools are components in a value chain of software products that enable the creation, management, publication, and delivery of content across a variety of media including print, email, web, social media, and the next generation of e-reader, tablet, and mobile devices such as the iPad.
Without an understanding of the digital media market over the past 30 years, this may seem just like another investment by a financial investment company. For those of us who have been involved in the major changes that have happened over this period, to us Quark is one of the key companies that had driven the changes in the industry. Tim Gill and Mark Pope founded the company in 1981 and over the next 20 years its products were central to changing the face of printing and publishing.
A new frontier
Its first core product was Word Juggler, the first word processor for the Apple III computer. It introduced QuarkXPress 1.0 for the Apple Macintosh in 1986 into the new market of desktop publishing. At that time, the market leader was Aldus (later Adobe) Pagemaker, but we also had other systems including Letraset’s ReadySetGo and Ventura Publisher. QuarkXPress added the level of precision layout and typography that the competing products lacked. Around the same time as QuarkXPress was launched, property entrepreneur Fred Ebrahimi joined Quark as chief executive. He took over the business operations of the company, leaving Tim Gill to run the technology side of the business. Mark Pope left the firm in 1990 and sold his share to Ebrahimi and Gill.
While QuarkXPress 1.0 had established Quark as a key player in the market, the introduction of XPress 3.0 in 1990 and the release of the product for Windows in 1992 allowed Quark to dominate the quality desktop publishing market. By the end of the 1990s, it had a market share of around 90% – this market was the professional market, whereas products like Adobe Pagemaker and Microsoft Publisher were mainly sold to the corporate and home markets. One of the key factors that allowed Quark to reach its dominant position was the invention by Tim Gill of Quark XTensions. This was the first time that add-ons developed by companies other than the core software developer allowed the same product to handle a wide range of different tasks. (A similar approach was later developed by Adobe for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign with Plug-ins).
The use of XTensions allowed systems integrators to use QuarkXPress as the pagination and composition engine for multiple terminal publishing systems. Many of the leading suppliers of newspaper and magazine publishing systems used QuarkXPress with their own XTensions for this purpose. It was also used for linking up with high-quality colour imaging systems to make total page assembly solutions. This was at a time when a colour page assembly workstation would cost in excess of $500,000.
In addition to QuarkXPress, Quark also built a number of other systems in that time, most notably the multi-terminal Quark Publishing System, which became the largest-selling newspaper and magazine editorial system in the world, with over 1,000 installations.
Competition hots up
Despite its huge success, however, there was a great degree of criticism of Quark for slow innovation, buggy software releases, high prices and poor customer support. It was only with the release of Adobe's InDesign that QuarkXPress got any major competition. Many of the systems integrators that used XPress for pagination moved to replace it with InDesign because of the business approach of Quark.
At that time, the company was staggeringly profitable and since it was a private firm totally owned by Ebrahimi and Gill, the pair became very rich, both appearing in the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the US during that time. In 1994, Gill founded the Gill Foundation, a charitable organisation to promote justice and equality while building awareness of the contributions gay men and lesbians make to American society. In 2000, Gill sold his share of Quark to Ebrahimi and left to concentrate on the Gill Foundation and other charitable activities.
Under Ebrahimi’s control, much of the company’s development activity moved to India. In the early to mid-2000s, the company lost influence and moved more into acquisitions to expand its product line with companies for developing add-ons for QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. It also bought a company with an XML editor for use in its XML publishing system. In 2006, Ebrahimi gave his shares to his children and his daughter Sasha become the company chairman. Raymond Schiavore, the former boss of Arbortext became the new chief executive. In August 2011, the Ebrahimi family sold their shares in Quark to Platinum Equity.
Gill and Ebrahimi between them established and ran an extremely successful company that was as significant as Adobe Systems in changing the face of printing and publishing. Gill’s technological and creative genius was fundamental to this, and Ebrahimi’s aggressive but also charming business skills allowed Gill to do what he did best. I had the pleasure to work with them both in organising and presenting seminars, assessing their products and undertaking some consultancy work. Both could be extremely difficult to work with but were also fair and honest businessmen, running what was a staggeringly successful and profitable company.
It will now be interesting to see the direction in which Platinum Equity take the company.
