Adobe Systems, Inc. history, profile and history video
Adobe Systems, Inc. is a software company, which provides digital marketing and digital media solutions. It offers a line of software and services used by creative professionals, marketers, knowledge workers, application developers, enterprises and consumers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing and engaging with compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media. The company operates through three business segments: Digital Media, Digital Marketing and Print & Publishing. The Digital Media segment provides tools and solutions that enable individuals, small businesses and enterprises to create, publish, promote and monetize their digital content anywhere. Its customers include traditional content creators, web application developers and digital media professionals, as well as their management in marketing departments and agencies, companies and publishers. The Digital Marketing segment provides solutions and services for how digital advertising and marketing are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Its customers include digital marketers, advertisers, publishers, merchandisers, web analysts, chief marketing officers and chief revenue officers. The Print & Publishing segment addresses diverse publishing needs of technical and business publishing, and OEM printing businesses. Adobe was founded by Charles M. Geschke and John E. Warnock in December 1982 and is headquartered in San Jose, CA, United States.
HISTORY
The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind the houses of both of the company’s founders. Adobe’s corporate logo, featuring the stylized “A”, was designed by Marva Warnock, wife of John Warnock, who is also a graphic designer.
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, the then-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.
In 1993, Adobe introduced PDF, the Portable Document Format, and its Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. PDF is now an International Standard: ISO 32000-1:2008. The technology is adopted worldwide as a common medium for electronic documents.
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 product 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 product line after Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. In 1996, Adobe Systems Inc added Ares Software Corp. In 1999, Adobe introduced Adobe InCopy as a direct competitor to QuarkCopyDesk.
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.
In 2013 Adobe Systems endured a major security breach. Vast portions of the source code for the company’s software were stolen and posted online and over 150 million records of Adobe’s customers have been made readily available for download.
*Information from Forbes.com, Wikipedia.org, and www.adobe.com
**Video published on YouTube by “Adobe Creative Cloud“