We’re pretty sceptical of most of the figures put out by market research outfits, not least because different organisations seem to come out with such strikingly different figures when they purport to be measuring the same thing. Nevertheless there is a deal of interest in the desk-top publishing business, and very little hard data to go on, so readers may find some figures from a survey by Paris-based Intelligent Electronics useful. The company, now part of the International Data Corp empire, in a survey of all desk-top publishing products on Apple Macintosh and MS-DOS machines, reckons that the UK has been the biggest market in 1987, with 18,200 desk-top publishing software packages sold. Next comes West Germany with 10,700 packages, and France follows with 4,900. Breaking down UK sales by package, Intelligent Electronics puts Aldus Corp’s Pagemaker in top spot with 52.2% of the total, followed by Rank-Xerox with Ventura Publisher, 12.6%. Digital Research is third with GEM, 7.2%, followed by Quark with X-Press, 6.6%, and Letraset with 6% for Ready Set Go. Others account for the 15.4% balance. In Germany, Aldus holds about the same market share as in the UK, with 49.5%, but Ventura is a much stronger number two with 25.2%, and Ragtime from Bruning & Everth is third with 13.1%, leaving 12.2% for the rest. And in France, Pagemaker is again top of the tree with 51.2%, followed by Ventura again with 13.1%, Ready Set Go is third with 7.1%, Ragtime gets 6%, X-Press has 4.8%, and others are scrapping over 17.8%.
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