Adobe Systems (NASDAQ symbol ADBE) is best known for
products relating to the formatting, printing, and display of
documents. Founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles
Geschke, the company is named for a creek near one of their
homes.
Adobe’s first major product was a language that describes
the font sizes, styles, and other formatting needed to print
pages in near-typeset quality .This was a
significant contribution to the development of software for
document creation (see desktop publishing), particularly on
the Apple Macintosh, starting in the later 1980s. Building on
this foundation, Adobe developed high-quality digital fonts
(called Type 1). However, Apple’s TrueType fonts proved to
be superior in scaling to different sizes and in the precise
control over the pixels used to display them. With the licens-
ing of TrueType to Microsoft for use in Windows, TrueType
fonts took over the desktop, although Adobe Type 1 remained
popular in commercial typesetting applications. Finally, in
the late 1990s Adobe, together with Microsoft, established a
new font format called OpenType, and by 2003 Adobe had
converted all of its Type 1 fonts to the new format.
Adobe’s Portable Document Format has become
a ubiquitous standard for displaying print documents. Adobe
greatly contributed to this development by making a free
Adobe Acrobat PDF reader available for download
Image Processing Software
In the mid-1980s Adobe’s founders realized that they could
further exploit the knowledge of graphics rendition that they
had gained in developing their fonts. They began to create
software that would make these capabilities available to illus-
trators and artists as well as desktop publishers. Their first
such product was Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, a vec-
tor-based drawing program that built upon the graphics capa-
bilities of their PostScript language.
In 1989 Adobe introduced Adobe Photoshop for the
Macintosh. With its tremendous variety of features, the
program soon became a standard tool for graphic artists.
However, Adobe seemed to have difficulty at first in antici-
pating the growth of desktop publishing and graphic arts
on the Microsoft Windows platform. Much of that market
was seized by competitors such as Aldus PageMaker and
QuarkXPress. By the mid-1990s, however, Adobe, fueled by
the continuing revenue from its PostScript technology, had
acquired both Aldus and Frame Technologies, maker of the
popular FrameMaker document design program. Meanwhile
PhotoShop continued to develop on both the Macintosh and
Windows platforms, aided by its ability to accept add-ons
from hundreds of third-party developers .
Multimedia and the Web
Adobe made a significant expansion beyond document pro-
cessing into multimedia with its acquisition of Macromedia
(with its popular Flash animation software) in 2005 at a cost
of about $3.4 billion. The company has integrated Macrome-
dia’s Flash and Dreamweaver Web-design software into its
Creative Suite 3 (CS3). Another recent Adobe product that
targets Web-based publishing is Digital Editions, which inte-
grated the existing Dreamweaver and Flash software into a
powerful but easy-to-use tool for delivering text content and
multimedia to Web browsers. Buoyed by these developments,
Adobe earned nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2005, about
$2.5 billion in 2006, and $3.16 billion in 2007.
Today Adobe has over 6,600 employees, with its head-
quarters in San Jose and offices in Seattle and San Francisco
as well as Bangalore, India; Ottawa, Canada; and other loca-
tions. In recent years the company has been regarded as a
superior place to work, being ranked by Fortune magazine
as the fifth best in America in 2003 and sixth best in 2004
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