Here's where the fun begins, as well as the great debate because for years, Quark has been dominant in the publishing industry at the best desktop publishing software. It seems that this success has somewhat gone to Quark's head as they have been very slow to release updates, fixes, and provide a general quality of service needed for people in the print industry. There have also been people who have said that Quark 4.11 was the best version that Quark made and it's been somewhat downhill or at best, humming along in mediocrity since then.
Now Adobe on the other hand has not had software that people wanted to take seriously yet. PageMaker left a lot to be desired (a co-worker of mine calls it RageMaker) and InDesign was something of a hobby project through ID 2.
It was with the release of InDesign CS 1 that a lot of people stood up and took notice. Adobe has always been known for listening to those in the industry and it was obvious to many that they had done their homework prior to releasing this version (InDesign 3 technically.) It was such a huge change that many designers starting to see the benefits of it, including a whole lot of devoted Quark people.
By the way, the huge change in this software has also created a system that can't save down to previous versions (which CS 2 fixes slightly as it will save down to CS 1.) While this will ultimately be good for the software, since it only runs in OS X, it may cause some headaches that can only be gotten around by creating a PDF from the ID 1 file and then embedding that in to a new ID 2 file. Not great, but something of a workaround if it has to be done.
We did our research at the company before upgrading. It was obvious that ID was a far superior product to Quark. Of course it was going to be hard to convince a lot of the designers of that, since nearly all of them had been working in Quark for many, many years. To speed along the desire to adopt, we managed to get Adobe to come down and do a demonstration of the products for us. Depending on the size of your company, you might be able to get them to do the same and I highly recommend pursuing that, since designers are visually-oriented people and seeing what a software can do will go a long way to helping them want to change.
Beyond the fact that ID appeared to be a better software, there were two other things that were also important in deciding to switch over to it.
1. InDesign is a far cheaper option when upgrading your design software to OS X. The Creative Suite 1 package cost somewhere around $800 and included Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, and InDesign CS. Quark was around $800 by itself. It was much cheaper to buy the entire CS package than to buy single titles. So, in buying CS and then buying Quark, you are going to spend $1600, while if you switch over to ID, you can skip Quark and get everything for $800. You're basically getting ID for free. Obviously this is some nasty marketing on Adobe's part and naturally it is quite appealing.
2. InDesign has another software you don't hear much about called InCopy. InCopy is a great concept because it creates this system called the Bridge Workflow (which has caused a naming conflict in CS 2 where the �Bridge� is a document management system independent of the InDesign/InCopy setup.) What this does, is let multiple people work on a document at the same time and it allows a person running InCopy only have access to text-based areas of a document that a person who creates the document in InDesign wants them to get at. So, in an environment where you have a lot of editors changing the text on something the designer has created, this works great so that they can all be in it at the same time. This also means a large cost savings, since you can pick up InCopy for about $250 thus stemming the need to get ID for your editing machines. It needs to be noted right now that this isn't a perfect solution and there are some quirks with it, but I'll get to those later...