Quark's Logo is Better than Yours

So I get an email from Quark who is in the middle of an extreme makeover. I'm assuming it's because Adobe and Macromedia are gettin' hitched and will make even more competitive little babies. As a Quark customer for many years, there are a few things about Quark I have never liked:

The excessive high price of Xpress
Their inexecusably poor customer service
The lack of useful enhancement for content creators versus graphic designers
The excessive high price of Xpress

I'm not the only one either. Much has been written about their poor customer service and lack of response to their market. None of these issues were addressed in this marketing email from Quark. Instead, what is the email basically about?

I would like to take this opportunity to present you with an exciting change at Quark. As you can see from this e-mail message, we've re-designed our logo and corporate identity to reflect our evolution over the past couple of years.

You'll see our new look in e-mail messages, on Quark.com, and on everything we do.

As I'm sure you have noticed recently, our logo and corporate identity are not the only things that have changed at Quark. We have grown into a company that listens and responds, and we're happy to show off our new look to compliment our new outlook.

Let us know what you think — about our new logo or whatever is on your mind. Just send an e-mail message to cservice@quark.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Their logo? Granted, their audience does consist mainly of graphic designers, but come on. Their logo has no affect on how their customers do business. To write a marketing email to draw attention to their logo rather than problems they are supposedly addressing is strikingly self-aggrandizing as well as a poor marketing strategy. Then to top it off, when I clicked the link the other day, here is the first thing I saw on Quark's Web site: