Quark, Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado) is a privately-owned software company best known for QuarkXPress. Quark's attempts to diversify into other related areas have so far failed (multimedia development, photo/image editing), the only other success so far is QPS, an editorial system based on QuarkXPress. It is called Quark because the company's goal is to "create software that would be the platform for publishing", just as quarks are the basis for all matter. [1]

Quark was founded by Tim Gill (President) and Fred Ebrahimi (CEO). Following Gill's retirement from the company, Ebrahimi took on both leadership roles. Quark has also followed a recent US trend of offloading their programming and technical support to companies in India.

For much of its history, Quark had a history of doing relatively infrequent new versions, and pricing them at a high level. This, combined with public perception of CEO Ebrahimi's attitude towards their customers, has resulted in a strong negative feeling among many of Quark's customers, which seems to be enhancing competitor Adobe Systems' ability to woo people to try their competing software, Adobe InDesign. However, in 2004 Meryl Lynch estimates the market share of QuarkXPress is still eight times higher than Adobe InDesign.

In February 2004, Quark appointed Kamar Aulakh as the new CEO of Quark (in addition to his current role as president of the company). In this new capacity, Aulakh is responsible for all operations of the Quark companies worldwide. Fred Ebrahimi has retired from day-to-day operations.

In 2003 Quark migrated most of its development resources to India, by building a city in Mohali (Quark city).

See also

• Company webpage
• QuarkVSInDesign.com, which reports on Quark, its software, and the Quark-Adobe feud