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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1348
20 Years of Adobe
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
December 5th 2002
How the world's second-biggest software concern survived two decades.
Adobe celebrates its 20th year this week, and an article at the San Jose Mercury
reflects on how the company has survived a tumultuous two decades, while many other
software companies have fallen by the wayside.
Adobe is the world's second-biggest software firm, outstripped only by Microsoft.
Adobe ran into trouble in 1998, and ex-Apple and MS marketing man Bruce Chizen, now
CEO of the firm, sought to move Adobe to a more profitable and sustainable business
model. As one Merrill Lynch analyst notes, the 'old' Adobe was not as profitable as it
might have been.
Chizen has restructured Adobe and pruned the workforce by over 200. While the cuts
have attracted criticism, Adobe's sales performance during the downturn has been
reasonable, and profitability is
Adobe has developed into a company less reliant upon Apple for its revenue streams,
but clearly the switch to OS X hurt Adobe earnings - and revenue - as the firm rushed
to bring Photoshop 7, its OS X-native version, to market. However, Adobe is currently
reaping the benefits of moving its products across to OS X, with InDesign 2.0 a
qualified success, and with no rival in sight from Quark Inc. as yet.
Adobe's other big success is in leveraging its PostScript technology to make PDF a
standard in digital, cross-platform publishing. As early as 1996, Microsoft's Gates
asked his senior executives, "Where is our Acrobat competitor?" Gates was right to
identify the importance of Acrobat and its significance; but, to date, MS has had no
answer. Apple, taking advantage of the open PDF specification in its development of OS
X, now has PDF built into the system - and its free. Display PostScript, while
superior, would have cost serious licensing money.
The man who deserves much of the credit, however, is Adobe's founder, John Warnock.
Without Warnock's developmenjt of the PostScript language, there would have been no
LaserWriter, and no Mac publishing, graphics and design industry. And no Quark,
probably. But it was PostScript's licensing fees which brought Adobe undone and led to
the unlikely Apple-MS alliance of the warly 1990s which produced TrueType (of most
value to Microsoft) and forced Adobe to open up the PostScript specification.
Now, most laser printers use a PostScript interpreter. We all use PDF. We might not
like the Adobe of today so much, but we have a lot to thank John Warnock for.
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