Quark Inc still has got a lot to learn about keeping its customers happy. Recently, the company made Quark XPress 3.2 available before the upgrades were ready, meaning that existing customers could not access any files sent to them by colleagues with the new version. When complaints flooded in, the UK office in Guildford, Surrey went around telling people to go out and by a new copy if it’s that critical. Finally, at the end of last month, upgrade letters were sent out to UK customers – who found they were confronted with a bill of UKP150 per copy. For those users that have multiple copies of the software this makes the upgrade extremely unattractive, especially if they don’t want any of the new features – yet if they want to swap Quark files around they are left in a very awkward position. Embittered Quark users are now advising those new to desktop publishing to look elsewhere for their software.
