Macworld Biased Against Adobe?

Quark VS InDesign .com accuses Macworld of bias against Adobe, maker of Photoshop, InDesign, and several other industry-standard creative applications, by ignoring Adobe’s products in the recently announced 20th Annual Editors’ Choice Awards.

After giving InDesign CS rave reviews all year, including a statement in a February 2004 article that “InDesign CS is the program that will relegate QuarkXPress to PageMaker’s status of a decade ago,” and, in the same article, “XPress’s unique strengths have dwindled to a few little-used functions,” Macworld editors still named QuarkXPress 6.5 the Most Improved Page-Layout Program.

Similarly, despite winning in several categories last year, Adobe’s Photoshop and After Effects, best-of-class standards among numerous professional creative industries, were passed over for Eddy Awards this time out.

Macworld’s editors “went back over the products they’d seen and reviewed over the past year—those released between November 1, 2003, and November 1, 2004—and they nominated their favorites.” The Quark VS InDesign .com article intimates that the editors’ favorites may have been motivated more by Apple’s recent aggressive competition to Adobe in certain markets than by the merits of the programs being judged.

”I think Macworld was actually honest, if you read carefully,” says Mark W. in a response to the Quark VS InDesign.com article. “In the 2003 Eddys Macworld ‘looked at nearly every new Mac product on the market between Nov. 1, 2002 to Nov. 1, 2003, evaluating their overall quality as well as their utility, innovation, and elegance.’ This time they just ‘nominated their favorites.’”