Adobe Inc.

Adobe Systems is a computer software company.

Adobe Systems is a publically traded American company founded (in 1982?) by John Warnock and Charles M. Geschke after they left Xerox to further develop and commercialize the PostScript page description language, which Apple Computer subsequently licenced for use in their LaserWriter printer product line (in 1985?). The company name comes from the popularity of adobe houses in New Mexico, where the original offices were.

Adobe soon after entered the consumer software market by introducing Adobe Illustrator(tm), 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 Bezier 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 Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh's QuickDraw routines and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach until Adobe's own ATM (Adobe Type Manager) and Apple's eventual adoption of TrueType.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) and later Quark (which released Quark Xpress). 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 Job's ill-fated NeXT computer but a far-too-featureless version for Windows.

History has been kind, however. Since it always had PostScript interpreter licencing to fall back on, Adobe simply outlasted its rivals 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.

Adobe's reputation (for better or worse) unfortunately includes a common perception of over-aggresiveness. This started with their practice of encrypting their high-quality Type 1 fonts, charging what many felt were overly-high prices for fonts and interpreter licences, and then refusing to change despite obvious consumer harm when the font format standards were forked with the introduction of TrueType from Apple and Microsoft.

But perhaps the most damaging incident was the FBI's arrest of Dmitry Sklyarov for what it 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 is 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.

Adobe's latest efforts are mainly centered on Portable Document Format. Although sales of their Acrobat product (which is a PDF file generator) have not provided signficant revenue, Adobe's interests are likely long-term. There are also ancilliary benefits, such as providing a common, high-quality data exchange infrastructure for their publishing applications.

External link:

Adobe's web-site is at http://www.adobe.com.