Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Adobe's next foray was into digital fonts, which the firm released in a proprietary
format called
Type 1
. Shortly, after Apple developed (and licensed to Microsoft) the rival
standard
TrueType
(powering full scalability and precise control of the pixel pattern cre-
ated by font outlines) Adobe returned fire by publishing the
Type 1
specification, thus al-
lowing third-party developers to enter the game. At the same time, Adobe released
Adobe
Type Manager
. Though it lacked pixel-level control, this latter software nevertheless al-
lowed WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) scaling of fonts on screen just like
TrueType
.
In the end,
TrueType
endured to dominate the general software market, becoming a core
element of Windows.
Type 1
, however, came to own the small, but still lucrative, graphics/
publishing market. Eventually, Microsoft and Adobe hammered out a truce and in 1996 an-
nounced the
OpenType
font format (fully implemented by 2003).
During the mid-1980s, Adobe entered the DTP software market with
Adobe Illustrator
for the Macintosh
, a vector-based drawing application. Far more elegant than Apple's own
MacDraw
,
Illustrator
provided nearly perfect WYSIWYG accuracy. Following this, in
1989, Adobe released what was to become its flagship product: the
Photoshop
graphics
editing package. Four years later, Adobe introduced the Portable Document Format (PDF)
- still today the worldwide standard for electronic documents and the revolutionary Adobe
Acrobat Reader.
Adobe was slow to address the emerging Windows DTP market, although it eventually
had a measure of success in this space with
InDesign
and the bundled
Creative Suite
. One
other misstep was Adobe's costly development and release of a version of
Illustrator
for
Steve Jobs' ill-fated NeXT system, along with a poorly-implemented version for Windows.
Adobe released
Adobe Premiere
in December of 1989, this to be rebranded as
Adobe
Premiere Pro
in 2003. During 1984, Adobe acquired Aldus, thus adding
PageMaker
and
After Effects
to its portfolio; Adobe as well controls the vital TIFF file format. In 1995,
Adobe added
FrameMaker
, a robust long-document DTP application, to its portfolio after
acquiring Frame Technology Corp. During 1999, Adobe introduced Adobe
InCopy
as a dir-
ect competitor to
QuarkCopyDesk
. Many more acquisitions and software releases were to
follow.
Adobe Systems went public, entering the NASDAQ, in 1986. Adobe's 2006 revenues
were reported as $2.575 billion. As of this writing (spring 2011), Adobe's market capitaliz-
ation stands at approximately $17 billion.
Other success stories include systems-security provider Symantec, founded in 1984
with a National Science Foundation grant and now a
Fortune 500
company and a member
of the S&P 500 stock market index. Approximately two-thirds of the company's revenue
comes from the design and distribution of enterprise software, with the balance being se-
curity and optimization apps and utilities for PCs and Apple products.
