Re: [SLUG] I told them . . .

From: Chad Perrin (perrin@apotheon.com)
Date: Fri Aug 27 2004 - 00:51:08 EDT


Ken Elliott wrote:

> Ok, let me clarify: "Way Behind" in market share and use at large
> publishing houses. All the magazines I wrote for were Mac Users.
>

[snip]

You make good points. I had forgotten about the lack of Quark plugin
portability across platforms (probably because I never actually ended up using
any Quark plugins in my admittedly limited experience with the software).

I don't have any experience with or particular knowledge of LaTex, but from
discussions with those who have used it I have to wonder if it might not be an
effective replacement for Quark Xpress. Have you had the opportunity to compare
functionality?

Personally, I'm not terribly worried about market share as a quality metric in
the context of the foregoing discussion. I was more intent upon matters of
functionality, reliability, and ease of use. If such things can be maintained,
I think that market share will come with time. Ultimately, it seems to me that
(all else being equal) the development advantages of open source software will
cause closed source, proprietary options to begin to fall by the wayside.

As far as I've been able to determine, Macs are becoming more and more
marginalized and obsolete insofar as comparable functionality in graphics,
layout, and design are concerned. The necessity of learning a Mac in such
fields is more based on the continuing prevalence of the platform based on
traditional business preferences, rather than on actual functional superiority.
  On the other hand, MacOS X may well be the best desktop OS available at this
time, application support notwithstanding. It simply lacks in more specialized
areas, such as in code development where Unixlike platforms such as Linux tend
to dominate.

-- 
Chad Perrin (apotheon .com .net .org)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/sig-block.html
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