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Blimey! Quark Scarpered! (10/22/02)
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Regular viewers may have noticed that we here at AtAT generally shy away from incorporating desktop publishing developments into the plot; sure, for some of you the lack of a Mac OS X version of QuarkXPress might constitute a life-or-death situation and edge-of-your-seat drama, but for us it's practically Snoozeville. Nothing personal, you understand, but it's just a matter of what floats one's boat, and our particular watercraft simply isn't buoyed by the world of CMYK and halftones and all that jazz.
Of course, if a desktop publishing situation arrives dripping with drama and has a Mac slant to boot, well, then that's something we can use without drifting off to Dreamland in the middle of a scene. What luck, then, that faithful viewer Tara Keezer tipped us off to a Macworld UK article about Quark's sudden decision to flee England so quickly and so thoroughly, you'd think they knew something we don't. Something about an imminent invasion by the Normans, perhaps? According to Macworld UK, Quark now has exactly two remaining UK staff, presumably left behind as bait to slow the advance of the conquering hordes who will pause to strip the flesh from the stragglers' bones before pillaging the rest of the country.
Okay, so maybe it's not an invasion that Quark's worried about; Macworld UK actually quotes one former Quark employee as reasoning that CEO Fred Ebrahimi wanted his company out of the UK because he "does not like the Macintosh platform." Uhhhh... say what now? Is this meant to imply that the head of Quark thinks that the UK is a bastion of Mac users? The AtAT staff was in the UK last year, and Mac users were harder to spot than gibbons running loose in Piccadilly Circus. Either things have changed drastically in the year since we left, or ol' Fred there needs to lay off the cough syrup.
No shills for Adobe are we, but it seems to us that an unnamed source stating that Quark is run by a Mac-hater (with an odd sense of demographics, apparently) might push a few fence-sitters who were waiting for a Carbonized Quark over into the InDesign camp-- but again, that's a tussle we find about as interesting as sorting lentils by size. Instead, we're going to check into this Norman invasion thing... plenty of potential for some ensuing wackiness there.
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SceneLink (3791)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/22/02 episode: October 22, 2002: No fisticuffs yet, and IDG agrees to let Apple attend Macworld Expo San Francisco-- but the future of the East Coast show is still up in the air. Meanwhile, something's a little strange about those IDC market share numbers, and Quark evacuates the UK so quickly you'd think they know something we don't...
Other scenes from that episode: 3789: Throw A Punch Already (10/22/02) Alas, we fear the worst of the storm has passed, with nary a single disembowelment to be seen. The way that Apple and IDG World Expo have been behaving lately, we felt sure there'd be bloodshed by now-- but apparently our best hopes for extreme and brutal violence have been dashed by that consarned new-fangled invention called the "telephone."... 3790: They Forgot To Carry The 1 (10/22/02) Hey now, it's been pointed out to us that there's something slightly fishy about those latest sales numbers from IDC that had us fretting about Apple's market share plummeting ever earthward-- to wit, there's a minor discrepancy between IDC's count of Macs sold and Apple's own reported number of units shipped...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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