() () is an
American Computer Software company headquartered in
San Jose, California 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.
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 ;
Noida and
Bangalore in
India ; and
Ottawa ,
Canada . Minor Adobe development offices include a location near
Minneapolis ,
Minnesota and in
Hamburg ,
Germany .
Adobe's first products following PostScript were digital , announced the
OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed the conversion of its library of
Type 1 Font s 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 Printer s. Unlike
MacDraw (then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program), Illustrator described all shapes with more flexible
Bézier Curve s, 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QuickDraw libraries and would not be superseded by a PostScript-like approach until Adobe's own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 provides a common, high-quality data exchange infrastructure for its DTP applications.
Among open software advocates, some see Adobe 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 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.
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 .
In many circles Adobe is considered one of the most principled of the major software companies, and one that treats its large corporate customers and employees well, although customer service for smaller businesses and individuals has often received unfavorable press. Adobe has climbed
Fortune Magazine 's rankings as an outstanding place to work over the last several years (2001-03). 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.
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.
