Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek, which ran behind the house of one of the company's founders. Adobe acquired its former competitor, Macromedia, in December 2005.

As of January 2007, Adobe Systems has 6,677 employees, about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Ottawa, Ontario; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Newton, Massachusetts; San Luis Obispo, California; Hamburg, Germany; Noida, India and Bangalore, India.

Since 1995, Fortune has ranked Adobe as an outstanding place to work. Adobe was rated the fifth-best U.S. company to work for in 2003, sixth in 2004, 31st in 2007 and 40th in 2008. In 2007 Adobe ranked 9th on the list of largest software companies in the world.

History

Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts, which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1. Apple subsequently developed a competing standard, TrueType, which provided full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines, and licensed it to Microsoft. Adobe responded by publishing the Type 1 specification and releasing Adobe Type Manager, software that allowed WYSIWYG scaling of Type 1 fonts on screen, like TrueType, although without the precise pixel-level control. But these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType. Although Type 1 remained the standard in the graphics/publishing market, TrueType became the standard for business and the average Windows user. In 1996, Adobe and Microsoft announced the OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed converting its Type 1 font library to OpenType.

In the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator, which grew from the firm's in-house font-development software, helped popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. Unlike MacDraw, then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program, Illustrator described shapes with more flexible Bézier curves, providing unprecedented accuracy. Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh's QuickDraw libraries and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach until Adobe released Adobe Type Manager.

In 1989, Adobe introduced what was to become its flagship product, Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh. Stable and full-featured, Photoshop 1.0 was ably marketed by Adobe and soon dominated the market.

Arguably, one of Adobe's few missteps on the Macintosh platform was their failure to develop their own desktop publishing (DTP) program. Instead, Aldus with PageMaker in 1985 and Quark with QuarkXPress in 1987 gained early leads in the DTP market. Adobe was also slow to address the emerging Windows DTP market. However, Adobe made great strides in that market with release of InDesign and its bundled Creative Suite offering. In a failure to predict the direction of computing, Adobe released a complete version of Illustrator for Steve Jobs' ill-fated NeXT system, but a poorly produced version for Windows.

Despite these missteps, licensing fees from the PostScript interpreter allowed Adobe to outlast or acquire many of its rivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 1991, Adobe released Adobe Premiere, which Adobe rebranded to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003. In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus and added Adobe PageMaker and Adobe After Effects to its production line later in the year; it also controls the TIFF file format. In 1995, Adobe added Adobe FrameMaker, the long-document DTP application, to its production line after Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. In 1999, Adobe introduced Adobe InCopy as a direct competitor to QuarkCopyDesk.

Top competitors

According to Hoovers Adobe's top competitors are:

• Apple Inc.
• Microsoft
• Quark, Inc.

Company events

1992

• Acquired OCR Systems, Inc.

1999

• Acquired GoLive Systems, Inc. and released Adobe GoLive.
• Shipped Adobe InDesign as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress and eventual replacement for PageMaker.

2003

• May: Acquired Syntrillium Software, adding Adobe Audition to its product line.

2004

• December: Acquired French company OKYZ S.A., makers of 3D collaboration software. The acquisition added 3D technology and expertise to the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform.

2005

• December 12, 2005: Acquired its main rival Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion adding: Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Contribute, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), Adobe Director, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash, Macromedia FlashPaper, Adobe Flex, Macromedia FreeHand, Macromedia HomeSite, Macromedia JRun, Adobe Presenter, and Macromedia Authorware to Adobe's production line.

2006

• October: Adobe acquires Serious Magic, makers of Visual Communicator and video blogging application, Vlog It!
• December: The firm's headquarters buildings in San Jose received three Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certifications.

2007

• January: Released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to assist photographers in managing digital images and doing post production work. The product was intended as a competitor to Apple's Aperture in the RAW image editing market.
• May 2007: Acquired Scene7, which makes an image processing and display platform used in many retail sites on the web.
• July: Adobe released Adobe Soundbooth. This product was not intended to replace the existing Adobe Audition but merely to provide an environment for professionals not specializing in audio.
• August 3, 2007: announced their plans to discontinue development of Authorware, the “visual authoring tool for creating rich-media e-learning applications for delivery on corporate networks, CD/DVD, and the Web.” Authorware was one of the development tools acquired in the Macromedia/Adobe merger. No comparable eLearning development tool in terms of capabilities is being offered at this time by Adobe.
• October 2007: Acquired Virtual Ubiquity, with its online word processor, Buzzword.
• November 12, 2007: CEO, Bruce Chizen resigns. Effective December 1, he is to be replaced by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's current president and Chief Operating Officer. Bruce Chizen is expected to serve out his term on Adobe's Board of Directors, and then continue in a strategic advisory role until the end of Adobe's 2008 fiscal year.
• In December 2007, Apple Inc. released a security update for Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server to address vulnerabilities in the Adobe products Flash and Shockwave and in Tar, a GNU utility. Among the problems addressed were the ability to "execute arbitrary code" and to "surreptitiously initiate a video conference".

2008

• 27 April: Adobe discontinues development and sales of its older HTML/web development software, GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver. Adobe offers a discount on Dreamweaver for GoLive users and supports those who still use GoLive with online tutorials and migration assistance.
• 1 June: Adobe launches Acrobat.com, a series of web applications geared for collaborative work.

• Creative Suite 4 which includes Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection is due in October 2008 in six configurations at prices from about USD $1,700 to $2,500 or by individual application. The Windows version of Photoshop includes 64-bit processing.

Corporate leadership

Products

Adobe's products include

• desktop software, such as Adobe Photoshop (part of the Adobe Creative Suite) and Adobe Audition
• server software, such as Adobe ColdFusion and Adobe LiveCycle
• technologies, such as Portable Document Format (PDF), PDF's predecessor PostScript, and Flash

Financial information

As of February 2007, Adobe's market capitalization was roughly $23 billion USD; as of August 2007, its shares were trading on the NASDAQ for around $40 USD, with a P/E ratio of about 49 and EPS of about $0.82.

As of March 2008, Adobe's market capitalization was roughly $18 billion USD; its shares were trading on the NASDAQ for around $33 USD, with a P/E ratio of about 27 and EPS of about $1.21.

Revenue

2000s

1990s

See also

• Adobe Engagement Platform
• Adobe Solutions Network
• OpenType
• PDF
• PostScript
• Adobe ColdFusion
• Adobe MAX
• The case of Sklyarov, ElcomSoft, Adobe, and the DMCA

Notes

References

• Adobe Logo History. .
• Adobe timeline. .
• Patents owned by Adobe Systems. US Patent & Trademark Office. .
• San Jose Semaphore on Adobe's building
• Adobe Systems Incorporated Company Profile. Yahoo!. .

External links

• Adobe Systems Video and Audio on MarketWatch