Nosce te ipsum

I only mention this one because a) Quark is one of the few big tech companies from my home state and b) every time I think of them, I think of a company that literally owned their industry but completely gave it away to faster, more agile competitors who simply paid better attention to their market than Quark did.

How many years did it take for Quark to develop a verion of Express that ran natively on Mac OSX? ...and Adobe? (only about a third as much time) -- and while Quark was busy telling customers that if they didn't like the companies plans, then perhaps they should just switch platfforms -- all the while Adobe was giving away free copies of InDesign and offering free multi-day, inhouse training to print houses who were interesting in learning how to take thei operations to the next level, all on Adobe's dime. Sorry Quark but keeping Fred Ebrahimi in a position where he could actually put his foot in house mouth in public far too often, and most recently, the sudden and recent departure of their CEO Kamar Aulakh... need I go on? But hey, they've got a new logo! Looks like the marketing department is calling some of the shots at Quark now, always a sign of desperation.

Show everyone why I am different Publishing leader Quark adopts new logo and identity

DENVER - September 9, 2005 - There[base ']s a friendly sign of change at Quark: a new logo and visual identity that signal that the company is leaping forward into the future of creative communications.

Andy Ihnatko does a bang up job in his most recent column for the Chicago Sun-Times discussing what he defines as the Four Pillars of Computing. The article goes into much greater depth but in a nutshell, they can be summed up as:

• Pillar of Truth the Firste: You gotta back up all of your data regularly.
• Pillar the Seconde: As far as networks or the Internet are concerned, there is no such thing as security.
• Pillar the Thirde: Everything ultimately becomes outdated and obsolete.
• Pillar of Truth the Fourthe: Technology shouldn't suck.

Aside from his various day job writings, some of Andy's best work can be found on his blog - The Complete Waste of Bandwidth which is written entirely in AppleScript.