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Adobe Systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Adobe Systems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Adobe Systems

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search Adobe Systems, Inc.Type Founded Location Keypeople IndustryProductsRevenueEmployeesWebsite
Corporation (NASDAQ: ADBE)
San Jose (1982)
San Jose, California
Charles Geschke, Founder
John Warnock, Founder
Bruce Chizen, CEO
software publishing [1]
See complete products listing.
$1.996 billion USD (2005)
~5,200 (Jan 2006)
www.adobe.com

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) (LSE: ABS) 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 2005, Adobe Systems had over 4,000 employees, at least half of whom were located in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Seattle, Washington; Noida, India; and Ottawa, Canada. Minor Adobe development offices include a location near Minneapolis, Minnesota and in Hamburg, Germany. The 4,000 count was prior to the December 3, 2005 merger with Macromedia of San Francisco, California.

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History

Adobe Systems headquarters in San Jose EnlargeAdobe 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.

Among open software advocates, some see Adobe as overly aggressive. This image was created with their decision 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 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.

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.

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Employees

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Key employees

Executive Board
Charles M. Geschke Co-Chairman of the Board
John E. Warnock Co-Chairman of the Board
Bruce R. Chizen CEO, Director (2005 Compensation: $1.99 M USD)
Shantanu Narayen President & Chief Operating Officer (2005 Compensation: $1.08 MUSD)
Murray J. Demo CFO, SVP (2005 Compensation: $860,000 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 SVP 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 President, Worldwide Field Operations
Karen O. Cottle SVP, General Counsel, Secretary
James Heeger SVP, Creative Professional Business Unit (2003 Compensation: $591,086 USD)
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 VP, Corporate Communications
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Reputation

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.

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Products

Current
Recently Acquired Discontinued
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Financial information

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.

 

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See also

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External links

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Data

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Systems"

Categories: Companies listed on NASDAQ | Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange | Adobe Systems | Companies based in California | Computer companies of the United States | Software companies | Type foundries | 1982 establishments

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April 04, 2006 |