I recently began doing some contract work for a large Canadian publishing company. Over the next few months, our small Mac support team will move hundreds of employees from old OS 9 machines to new Macs running OS X.

Everything is shiny and new... except the publishing software. After months of planning and research, the corporation decided to stick with the Classic version of QuarkXPress 4.

Yes, I'm serious. The users are getting brand new dual processor Power Mac G5s with 20" Cinema Display monitors, but they will spend most of their working hours running Quark 4 in Classic mode.

Why? Because Quark 4 may be terrible and out of date, but -- like the old joke about democracy being the worst form of government "except all the others" -- the alternatives to Quark 4 are worse.