Adobe Systems





Adobe Systems is a computer software company, founded in December 1982 by
John Warnock and Charles Geschke after they left Xerox PARC to further
develop and commercialize the PostScript page description language. Apple
Computer subsequently licensed for use in their LaserWriter printer product
line in 1985, thereby sparking the desktop publishing revolution. The
company name comes from the Adobe Creek which ran near the company's
original offices in Mountain View, California. The headquarters of the
company are located in San Jose, California. There are about 3400 employees
working for Adobe in 2002.

Adobe's first retail product (the PostScript language doesn't count, since
it is licensed to manufacturers, not sold to end users) was digital fonts.
In 1996, the company announced the OpenType font format, jointly with
Microsoft, and in 2002-03 Adobe completed the conversion of its library of
Type 1 fonts to the new format.

In the mid-80s, soon after introducing PostScript, Adobe entered the
consumer software market by introducing Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based
drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. This was the logical outgrowth of
commercializing their in-house font-development software and to help
popularize the use of laser printers. Unlike MacDraw (the standard
vector-based drawing program for the Mac), Illustrator described all shapes
with the more flexible Bˇzier curve, and provided a level of accuracy sorely
missing. Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh's
QuickDraw routines and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach
until Adobe's own ATM (Adobe Type Manager) and Apple's eventual adoption of
TrueType.

Although Illustrator was an excellent product (still) highly valued by the
prepress industry, Adobe eventually hit its stride with the introduction of
Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh in 1989. Although there were competitors,
Photoshop 1.0 was extremely stable, well-featured, and of course came from a
major player that could afford to market it professionally. It was a
combination that soon eclipsed all else.

If Adobe made any mistakes with the Macintosh, it might have been their
missing the opportunity to develop their own publishing program. This was
done instead by Aldus (which released PageMaker in 1985) and later Quark
(which released QuarkXPress). Adobe was also too late to address the
emerging Windows DTP market, and thus let Corel Corp. dominate it with Corel
Draw. In a classic failure to predict the direction of computing, Adobe
released Illustrator for Steve Jobs' ill-fated NeXT computer but a
far-too-featureless version for Windows.

History has been kind, however. Since it always had PostScript interpreter
licensing to fall back on, Adobe simply outlasted its rivals in the late 80s
and early 90s, and eventually bought them out or, like Microsoft, kept
improving its applications until they met or exceeded the competition's. For
reasons unknown, Corel never leveraged their Draw product to do professional
illustration—users quietly derided it as something only office users
would touch—so when Illustrator was finally revamped for Windows,
prepress users found it too good to ignore. Corel's interest in acquiring
WordPerfect from Novell Corp. at the same time may have proved to be a key
distraction. In 1994, Adobe took over Aldus and thus acquired PageMaker.

Adobe's latest efforts are mainly centered on Portable Document Format
(PDF). Although sales of their Acrobat product (which is a PDF file
generator) were slow to start in the mid-90s, Adobe kept with the product,
perceiving long-term revenue potential, which has since panned out. There
are also ancilliary benefits, such as providing a common, high-quality data
exchange infrastructure for their publishing applications.

Among open software advocates, some see Adobe as overly aggressive. This
started with their choice to make their high-quality Type 1 fonts encrypted
and a proprietary format, allowing them to charge licensing fees to any
other company wishing to make them. The size of the fees were a factor in
Apple and Microsoft's decision to develop their own standard, TrueType. At
the show at which TrueType was introduced, Warnock followed TrueType talks
from both Apple and Microsoft VPs, and was near tears as he said that they
were being sold "smoke." A few months later Adobe published the Type 1
specification, and soon released the "Adobe Type Manager" software, which
allowed for WYSIWYG scaling of Type 1 fonts on screen, just like TrueType.
However, these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType, which
became the standard for business and the average Windows user, with Type 1
retaining the graphics/publishing market.

The most damaging incident for Adobe's reputation was the FBI's arrest of
Dmitry Sklyarov for what Adobe said was a violation of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. Sklyarov was arrested July 17, 2001 at the Def Con
conference in Las Vegas, NV, apparently at the behest of Adobe Systems,
according to a DOJ complaint, and was charged with distributing a product
designed to circumvent copyright protection measures. Sklyarov helped create
the Advanced eBook Processor (AEBPR) software for his Russian employer
Elcomsoft. This particularly angers those who see copyright protection as
opposed to free speech, because Adobe co-founder Warnock said in one
interview I am probably the strongest free-speech advocate you will ever
meet; I own a copy of the first printing of the Bill of Rights! I hate
censorship in any form. From this you can probably guess how I feel about
the telecommunications bill. Yet it was (according to some) a similar bill
that Adobe used to attack Sklyarov.

At the same time, in many circles Adobe is considered one of the most
principled of the major software companies, and one that treats its
customers well. Adobe also treats its employees well, and has over the last
several years (2001-03) climbed Fortune magazine's rankings as an
outstanding place to work. In 2003 Adobe was rated the 5th best company to
work for in the USA.