Irfan’s Corner on the Web On Mac, Linux, Grid, Virtualization and Software Technology

“Inside the Modern Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story”

Just today I completed reading this great book, which chronicles Adobe's life. Adobe Systems is one of the largest software companies in the World. Its products have a widespread usage aswell as effect on different users. Adobe's products have revolutionized many fields, which include: typesetting (PostScript), graphical image creation and editing (Illustrator and PhotoShop), Video editing (Premier), and numerous other fields.

How did it all start? Adobe's principle technology was PostScript. It was a derivative of one of XeroX PARC's internal projects called Interpress. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke were principle researchers in this project, the aim of the project was to develop a device independent way to express graphics and text, but due to some reasons Xerox refused to use the technology, and Warnock and Geschke pursued it by leaving Xerox and founding their own company, Adobe.

Adobe was never meant to be a software company, initially Warnock and Geschke thought of establishing a print house where people could come, one of them would be a counterman,greeting customers while the other would be in the back office converting documents to PostScript and printing them out. But their seed investor, Hambrecth, realized that they were scientists and would not be able to run a shop, so he assigned a consultant to propose a new business plan. Then Adobe became a hardware company which aimed at selling an entire office printing stack a computer for designing, and a printer for printing PostScript images. It was a discussion with Steve Jobs, over breakfast in Cupertino, in which he encouraged them to become a software company that they changed their plans. This was also the start of Adobe and Apple's relationship, which endures to this day.

Adobe PostScript was revolutionary, dubbed as the second revolution in typesetting after invention of moveable type by Gutenberg. It allowed users to describe documents with images and text in the same page, and represent them in a device independent manner. You could print a PostScript document in a 300dpi printer and a 1200 dpi printer, and the output looked the same. Before PostScript this was not possible, as PostScript was a vector format, which described objects mathematically whereas other technologies of the day used expensive and suboptimal raster/bit transformations. With PostScript it was also possible for Apple to develop a Laser Printer which was 5-10x cheaper than the ones produced by the giants of the day, mainly IBM and Xerox. The product become more widespread with the birth of WYSIWYG editors like PageMaker.

Adobe for much of its initial years followed a business model which revolved around PostScript licensing, and established it as a standard. But in 1989, a landmark alliance between Apple and Microsoft sought to develop a typesetting technology, TrueType, which would compete with Adobe. TrueType changed Adobe in more ways then one. It forced Adobe to open specifications to PostScript, allowing third parties to develop fonts aswell as diversify its business to other areas so that they would not be vulnerable by having only one product. In the Seybold Seminar in September 1989. Bill Gates extolled the virtues of TrueType and other relevant technologies the Apple and Microsoft Alliance was working on. When afterwards in the Question Answer session Warnock was asked for his take, he said to Bill Gates that this was “the biggest bunch of garbage and mumbo jumbo" he's ever heard.

After this event Adobe studied numerous other business in which it could get involved. One of the first products in this line was PhotoShop. Which was actually a PhD project of Thomas Knoll in the University of Michigan. Adobe licensed it and started developing it. PhotoShop was a major success for Adobe. It was the prime reason why Adobe survived the Internet boom. Adobe had no product for the Internet rather it was focusing on its PDF file format during those times. But web developer and graphic designers were heavily using PhotoShop for professional web sites.

Acrobat, the ubiquitous document format nowadays, started with a memo by Warnock in 1991, where he envisioned a technology for "enabling the exchange and delivery of documents, anytime, anywhere and on any device". Acrobat was revolutionary, although it took a long time to catch on. When its first version was released exchange of electronic document mainly consisted of exchanging text files, now it was possible to exchange visually rich documents. Version after version Acrobat gained strength: Version 3.0 introduced color, making it attractive for graphical designers;Version 4.0 introduced security, making it suitable for enterprise users and so on.

Adobe Premiere was another major product which was launched in the early 1990s. Premiere revolutionized the Video editing industry, much like PostScript revolutionized the typesetting industry. In this domain, Adobe faced competition from one of its own engineers; Randy Ubillus left Adobe to found Macromedia, which focused on multimedia editing. Macromedia was also more successful during the rise of Internet, with its WSYWYG web page authoring tool, DreamWeaver. Some time back Adobe acquired DreamWeaver, strengthening its position in all kinds of publishing domains: Type setting, video, graphic and Web. Adobe also debutted Flex framework, a programmatic way to generate Flash applications. With Flex Adobe is well set for the Web 2.0 era. Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), is yet another technology which enables application developers develop web technologies for the desktop.

Although Adobe has such a huge impact in the industry, there are dozens of products which failed, or were discontinued after a few versions.

So this was a brief summary of Adobe's life. The book goes into much more detail also explains the kind culture Adobe had and posseses which enabled it to develop highly successful product in diverse domains. Of course thats another full blog post