Adobe Systems
Company |
company_name = Adobe Systems, Inc. |
company_logo =
| company_type =
Corporation (
NASDAQ:
ADBE) | foundation =
San Jose (
1982) | location =
San Jose,
California,
USA | key_people =
Charles Geschke, Founder
John Warnock, Founder
Bruce Chizen,
CEOShantanu Narayen,
Pres. &
COO | industry =
software publishing [
1] | products =
See complete products listing. | revenue = $1.996 billion
USD (
2005) |
num_employees = ~5,200 (Jan 2006) |
homepage =
www.adobe.comAdobe Systems () () is an
American computer software company headquartered in
San Jose, California, United States that was founded in December 1982 by
John Warnock and
Charles Geschke. They founded Adobe after leaving
Xerox PARC in order to further develop and commercialize the
PostScript page description language. Adobe played a significant role in sparking the
desktop publishing revolution when
Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in the
LaserWriter printer product line in 1985. The company name
Adobe comes from the Adobe Creek, which ran behind the house of one of the company's founders.
Adobe acquired its former competitor,
Macromedia, in December 2005.
In early 2006, Adobe Systems had about 5,200 employees, about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in
Seattle, Washington;
San Francisco, California;
Noida and
Bangalore in
India; and
Ottawa,
Canada. Minor Adobe development offices include a location near
Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Newton, Massachusetts and in
Hamburg,
Germany.
 |
Adobe Systems headquarters in San Jose |
Adobe's first products following PostScript were digital
fonts. Adobe has continued to be a strong presence in the fonts market: in 1996, the company, in combination with
Microsoft, announced the
OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed the conversion of its library of
Type 1 fonts to OpenType.
In the mid-
1980s, soon after introducing
PostScript, Adobe entered the consumer
software market with
Adobe Illustrator, a
vector-based drawing program for the
Apple Macintosh. Illustrator was the logical outgrowth of commercializing their in-house font-development software. Additionally, it helped popularize the use of PostScript-enabled
laser printers. Unlike
MacDraw (then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program), Illustrator described all shapes with more flexible
Bézier curves, providing a level of accuracy not seen in other programs. 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's own
Adobe Type Manager software was introduced, preceding Apple's eventual adoption of
TrueType.
Although Illustrator was an excellent product and continues to be highly valued by the
prepress industry, Adobe introduced what was to become its
flagship product,
Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh, in 1989. Although Photoshop 1.0 had competitors, it was extremely stable and well-featured—and Adobe had the resources to market it. The combination enabled Photoshop to soon dominate its 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. In a classic 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.
History has been kind to Adobe, however. Because the company always had licensing fees from the PostScript interpreter to fall back on, Adobe was able to simply outlast many of its rivals in the late 1980s and early
1990s, and, like
Microsoft, eventually acquired its main competitors or continued to improve its applications until they became industry standards. For reasons unknown,
Corel never leveraged their
CorelDraw 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 Corporation around this time may have proved to be a key distraction. In 1994, Adobe took over Aldus and acquired PageMaker and the
TIFF file format; in 1995 they acquired the long-document DTP application
FrameMaker from Frame Technologies.
Adobe's latest efforts are mainly centered on its
Portable Document Format (PDF). Although sales of
Adobe Acrobat, which generates PDF files, were slow to start in the mid-1990s, Adobe continued to develop the product, perceiving its long-term potential for revenues. History has since shown this to be a wise investment. Adobe has also seen several ancillary benefits:
PDF provides a common, high-quality data exchange infrastructure for its DTP applications.
On
2005-04-18 Adobe Systems announced an agreement to acquire its former main rival
Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion on the last trading day before the announcement. The acquisition was consummated on
2005-12-03.
| Executive Board |
| Charles M. Geschke | Co-Chairman of the Board |
| John E. Warnock | Co-Chairman of the Board |
| Bruce Chizen | CEO, Director (2005 Compensation: $1.99 M USD) |
| Shantanu Narayen | President & Chief Operating Officer (2005 Compensation: $1.08 M USD) |
| - | Non Executive Board |
| Carol Mills | Director (executive vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Products Group, Juniper Networks) |
| Mike R. Cannon | Director (president, CEO and directors, Solectron Corp.) |
| James E. Daley | Director (independent consultant, former CFO of Electronic Data Systems) |
| Colleen M. Pouliot | Director (attorney, former senior vice-president and general counsel of Adobe Systems) |
| Robert Sedgewick | Director (computer science professor, Princeton University) |
| Delbert W. Yocam | Director (independent consultant, former chairman and CEO of Borland) |
| - | Senior Management |
| Stephen Elop (has announced his resignation effective December 2006) | President, Worldwide Field Operations |
| Karen O. Cottle | Senior vice-president (SVP), General Counsel, Secretary |
| Randy Furr | Executive vice-president, Chief Financial Officer |
| John Loiacono | Creative Solutions Business Unit |
| John Brennan | SVP, Corporate Development |
| Melissa Dyrdahl | SVP, Corporate Marketing and Communications |
| Bryan Lamkin | SVP, Creative Solutions (acting) |
| Naresh Gupta | SVP, Print and Classic Publishing Solutions, & Managing Director, India Research and Development |
| Thomas Hale | SVP, Knowledge Wordker Solutions |
| Kevin Lynch | SVP, Platforms |
| Tom Malloy | SVP and Chief Software Architect, Advanced Technology Labs |
| David Mendels | SVP, Enterprise and Developer Solutions |
| Alan S. Ramadan | SVP, Mobile and Device Solutions |
| Peg Wynn | SVP, Worldwide Human Resources |
| Kevin Burr | Vice-president, Corporate Communications |
Adobe is considered one of the more principled of the major software companies, and one that treats its large corporate customers well, although its customer service for smaller businesses and individuals has often received unfavorable press in recent years . It is also considered a company that treats its employees well, and thus Adobe has climbed
Fortune magazine's rankings as an outstanding place to work since 2001. Adobe was rated the fifth best American company to work for in 2003 and sixth best in 2004. (Adobe was ineligible for Fortune's ranking in 2005 due to its major acquisition of Macromedia.)
However, among open software advocates, Adobe is usually seen as overly controlling/proprietary. This image was created with their decision in the 1980s to use an encrypted, proprietary format for their high-quality Type 1 fonts, thus allowing them to charge licensing fees for any other company that wanted to produce or use Type 1 fonts. The size of these fees was a factor in Apple's development of their own
TrueType technology as well as Microsoft's decision to license TrueType from Apple at the beginning of the 1990s. At the presentation at which TrueType was introduced, Adobe head Warnock followed TrueType talks from both Apple and Microsoft VPs, and was near tears as he said that they were being sold "smoke." In fact, TrueType had definitive advantages: it provided not only full scalability, but also precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines. 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 (though without the precise pixel-level control). However, these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType, which quickly became the standard for business and the average Windows user, with Type 1 remaining the standard in the graphics/publishing market.
Adobe Systems entered
NASDAQ in 1986. Adobe's 2005 revenues were about $2.0 billion
USD.
As of March 2006, Adobe's
market capitalization is roughly $23
billion USD, and its shares are traded for $38
USD, with a P/E ratio of about 32 and EPS of about $1.20.
On
2005-04-18, Adobe Systems announced its acquisition of
Macromedia at $3.4 billion
USD. This was completed in December, 2005.
*Press Releases:
**
Adobe Press Release**
Macromedia Press Release*News on the acquisition of Macromedia:
**
USA Today*
Adobe Engagement Platform*
Adobe Solutions Network*
CoolType*
OpenType*
PDF*
PostScript*
Adobe Systems, Inc.**
Adobe Type Library**
*
Data
*
zh-yue:Adobe
