Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated

Type	Public (NASDAQ: ADBE)
Industry	Computer software[1]
Founded	Mountain View, California (1982)
Founder(s)	Charles Geschke John Warnock
Headquarters	San Jose, California, U.S.
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Charles Geschke, Founder John Warnock, Founder Shantanu Narayen, President & CEO
Products	See List of Adobe products
Revenue	US$2.95 Billion (FY 2009)[2]
Operating income	US$722 Million (FY 2009)[2]
Net income	US$387 Million (FY 2009)[2]
Total assets	US$7.28 Billion (FY 2009)[3]
Total equity	US$4.89 Billion (FY 2009)[3]
Employees	8,660 (December 2009)[4]
Website	Adobe.com

Adobe Systems Incorporated (pronounced /əˈdoʊbiː/ ə-DOE-bee) (NASDAQ: ADBE) is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. The company has historically focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products, with a more-recent foray towards rich Internet application software development.

Adobe was founded in December 1982^[4] by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the house of one of the company's founders.^[4] Adobe acquired its former competitor, Macromedia, in December 2005, which added newer software products and platforms such as Coldfusion, Dreamweaver, Flash and Flex to its product portfolio.

As of August 2009, Adobe Systems has 7,564 employees,^[4] about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Orlando, FL; Seattle, WA; San Francisco, CA; Orem, UT; Ottawa, Ontario; Minneapolis, MN; Newton, MA; San Luis Obispo, CA; Hamburg, Germany; Noida, India; Bangalore, India; Bucharest, Romania; Beijing, China.

History

Adobe Systems headquarters in San Jose, California.

Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts, which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1. Apple subsequently developed a competing standard, TrueType, which provided full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern created by the font's outlines, and licensed it to Microsoft. Adobe responded by publishing the Type 1 specification and releasing Adobe Type Manager, software that allowed WYSIWYG scaling of Type 1 fonts on screen, like TrueType, although without the precise pixel-level control. But these moves were too late to stop the rise of TrueType. Although Type 1 remained the standard in the graphics/publishing market, TrueType became the standard for business and the average Windows user. In 1996, Adobe and Microsoft announced the OpenType font format, and in 2003 Adobe completed converting its Type 1 font library to OpenType.

In the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the consumer software market with Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. Illustrator, which grew from the firm's in-house font-development software, helped popularize PostScript-enabled laser printers. Unlike MacDraw, then the standard Macintosh vector drawing program, Illustrator described shapes with more flexible Bézier curves, providing unprecedented accuracy. 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 released Adobe Type Manager.

In 1989, Adobe introduced what was to become its flagship product, a graphics editing program for the Macintosh called Photoshop. Stable and full-featured, Photoshop 1.0 was ably marketed by Adobe and soon dominated the market.^[5]

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. However, Adobe made great strides in that market with the release of InDesign and its bundled Creative Suite offering. In a 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.

Despite these missteps, licensing fees from the PostScript interpreter allowed Adobe to outlast or acquire many of its rivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 1991, Adobe released Adobe Premiere, which Adobe rebranded to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003. In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus and added Adobe PageMaker and Adobe After Effects to its production line later in the year; it also controls the TIFF file format. In 1995, Adobe added Adobe FrameMaker, the long-document DTP application, to its production line after Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. In 1999, Adobe introduced Adobe InCopy as a direct competitor to QuarkCopyDesk.^[6]

Company events

In 1992, Adobe acquired OCR Systems, Inc., and in 1994, they acquired Aldus Corporation. On May 30, 1997, Adobe reincorporated in Delaware by merging with and into Adobe Systems (Delaware), which was incorporated on May 9, 1997. Adobe Systems Incorporated (Delaware) was the surviving corporation and changed its name to Adobe Systems Incorporated concurrently with the merger.^[7]

The company acquired GoLive Systems, Inc. and released Adobe GoLive in 1999 and began shipping Adobe InDesign as a direct competitor to QuarkXPress and as an eventual replacement for PageMaker. In May 2003, Adobe acquired Syntrillium Software, adding Adobe Audition to its product line. In December 2004, French company OKYZ S.A., makers of 3D collaboration software, was acquired. This acquisition added 3D technology and expertise to the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform.

On December 12, 2005 Adobe acquired its main rival Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion, adding Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Contribute, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), Adobe Director, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash, FlashPaper, Adobe Flex, Macromedia FreeHand, Macromedia HomeSite, Macromedia JRun, Adobe Presenter, and Macromedia Authorware to Adobe's production line.^[8][9][10]

In January of 2007, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom was released to assist photographers in managing digital images and post production work. The product was intended as a competitor to Apple's Aperture in the RAW image editing market. Adobe acquired Scene7 in May of the same year. The company makes an image processing and display platform used in many retail sites on the web. In July, Adobe released Soundbooth. This product was not intended to replace the existing Adobe Audition but merely to provide an environment for professionals not specializing in audio. On August 3, 2007, the company announced their plans to discontinue development of Authorware, the “visual authoring tool for creating rich-media e-learning applications for delivery on corporate networks, CD/DVD, and the Web.”^[11] Authorware was one of the development tools acquired in the Macromedia/Adobe merger. It was replaced by Adobe Captivate. In October, the company acquired Virtual Ubiquity, along with its online word processor, Buzzword. On November 12, 2007, CEO, Bruce Chizen resigned. Effective December 1, he was replaced by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe's current president and Chief Operating Officer. Bruce Chizen served out his term on Adobe's Board of Directors, and then continued in a strategic advisory role until the end of Adobe's 2008 fiscal year.

Adobe released Adobe Media Player in April 2008. On the 27 of April, Adobe discontinued development and sales of its older HTML/web development software, GoLive in favor of Dreamweaver. Adobe offered a discount on Dreamweaver for GoLive users and supports those who still use GoLive with online tutorials and migration assistance. On June 1, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, a series of web applications geared for collaborative work.^[12] Creative Suite 4, which includes Design, Web, Production Premium and Master Collection came out in October 2008 in six configurations at prices from about USD $1,700 to $2,500^[13] or by individual application.^[14] The Windows version of Photoshop includes 64-bit processing.^[14] On December 3, 2008, Adobe laid off 600 of its employees (8% of the worldwide staff) citing the weak economic environment.

Adobe announced two acquisitions in 2009: on August 29, they purchased Business Catalyst.^[15], and on September 15, Adobe bought Omniture.^[16] On November 10, the company laid off 680 employees.^[17] In 2010, Adobe announced it was investigating a "coordinated attack" against corporate network systems in China, managed by the company.^[18] This same attack was also brought against Google and over 20 other companies. Adobe announced the new Creative Suite series (CS5) launched globally Monday, April 12, 2010. New software such as Flash Catalyst and Business Catalyst were also announced.

Adobe's 2010 was marked by continuing back-and-forth arguments with Apple over the latter's non-support for Adobe Flash on its iPhone, iPad and other products. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has claimed that Flash is not reliable or secure enough, while Adobe executives have argued that Apple just wants to own everything.

Corporate leadership

Products

Desktop software

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Soundbooth

Server software

Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Content Server and Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite

Formats

Portable Document Format (PDF), PDF's predecessor PostScript, ActionScript, Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV)

Web-hosted services

Adobe Kuler, Photoshop Express, and Acrobat.com

Web design programs

Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Contribute

Video editing and visual effects

Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects

eLearning software

Adobe Captivate

Financial information

Adobe Systems entered NASDAQ in 1986. Adobe's 2006 revenues were $2.575 billion USD.^[20]

As of February 2007, Adobe's market capitalization was roughly $23 billion USD; as of August 2007, its shares were trading on the NASDAQ for around $40 USD, with a P/E ratio of about 49 and EPS of about $0.82.^[20]

As of March 2008, Adobe's market capitalization was roughly $18 billion USD; its shares were trading on the NASDAQ for around $33 USD, with a P/E ratio of about 27 and EPS of about $1.21.^[20]

Revenue

Adobe's fiscal years run from December through November. For example, the 2007 fiscal year ended on November 30, 2007.

Awards

Since 1995, Fortune has ranked Adobe as an outstanding place to work. Adobe was rated the fifth-best U.S. company to work for in 2003, sixth in 2004, 31st in 2007, 40th in 2008, and eleventh in 2009.^[29] In May 2008, Adobe Systems India was ranked 19th of great places to work in India.^[30] In October 2008, Adobe Systems Canada Inc. was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc., and was featured in Maclean's newsmagazine.^[31]

Criticism

Adobe has been criticized^[32][33][34] for its pricing practices, with retail prices being as much as twice as high in foreign countries than in the domestic market^[35]. In June 2009, Adobe increased its prices in the UK by 10%.^[36]

See also

• Adobe Engagement Platform
• Adobe Solutions Network
• Adobe MAX
• US v. ElcomSoft Sklyarov
• List of Adobe software

Notes

References

• "Adobe Logo History". http://worldsbestlogos.blogspot.com/2007/08/adobe-systems-logo-history.html. 
• "Adobe timeline" (PDF). Archived from the original on 2006-01-06. http://www.archive.org/download/AdobeTimeline2005/timeline.pdf. 
• "Patents owned by Adobe Systems". US Patent & Trademark Office. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=an%2F%22Adobe+Systems%22&d=ptxt. Retrieved 8 December 2005. 
• San Jose Semaphore on Adobe's building
• "Adobe Systems Incorporated Company Profile". Yahoo!. http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/12/12518.html. 
• "Adobe Software for Middle Eastern languages". http://www.winsoft-international.com/en/products/all-products.html?marque_search_id=102&langue_search_id=0. 

External links

• Media related to Adobe Systems at Wikimedia Commons
• Adobe Systems Video and Audio on MarketWatch
• Tech's greatest arguments: Apple vs. Adobe Flash