Last week it was announced that Platinum Equity had acquired Quark Software Inc. Platinum Equity (www.platinumequity.com) 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 it's founding in 1995 Platinum Equity has completed more than 115 acquisitions.

Based in Denver, 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 thirty 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 Quark in 1981, and over the next twenty years its products were core elements that changed the face of printing and publishing. Its first core product was Word Juggler, the first word processor for the Apple III computer. It introduced Quark XPress 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. Quark XPress added the level of precision layout and typography that the competing products lacked. Around the same time as Quark XPress was launched Fred Ebrahimi a property entrepreneur, joined Quark as CEO. He took over the business operations of the company leaving Tim Gill to run the technology side of the company. Mark Pope left the company in 1990 and sold his share to Ebrahimi and Gill.

While Quark XPress 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 around 90%. This market is the professional market whereas products like Adobe Pagemaker and Microsoft Publisher mainly sold into 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 Quark Xpress as the pagination and composition engine for multiple terminal publishing systems. Many of the leading suppliers of newspaper and magazine publishing systems used Quark Xpress 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 Quark Xpress, Quark also built a number of other systems in that time particularly the multi-terminal Quark Publishing System that became the largest selling newspaper and magazine editorial system in the world with over 1,000 installations.

Despite the huge success of the company there was a great degree of criticism of them for slow innovation, buggy software releases, high prices and poor customer support. It was however only with the release of Adobe InDesign that Quark XPress 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.

The company at that time was staggeringly profitable and since it was a private company totally owned by Ebrahimi and Gill, the two of them became very rich. They both appeared in the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the USA during that time. In 1994 Gill founded the Gill Foundation a charitable organization 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 Quark XPress 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 CEO of Arbortext became the new CEO. On August 9, 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 organizing and presenting seminars, assessing their products and doing some consultancy work. Both could be extremely difficult to work with but both were 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.