Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems  is best known for products relating to the formatting, printing, and display of documents. Founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, the company is named for a creek near one of their homes. Adobe’s first major product was a language that describes the font sizes, styles, and other formatting needed to print pages in near-typeset quality . This was a significant contribution to the development of software for document creation , particularly on the Apple Macintosh, starting in the later 1980s. Building on this foundation, Adobe developed high-quality digital fonts. However, Apple’s TrueType fonts proved to be superior in scaling to different sizes and in the precise control over the pixels used to display them. With the licensing of TrueType to Microsoft for use in Windows, TrueType fonts took over the desktop, although Adobe Type 1 remained popular in commercial typesetting applications. Finally, in the late 1990s Adobe, together with Microsoft, established a new font format called OpenType, and by 2003 Adobe had converted all of its Type 1 fonts to the new format. Adobe’s Portable Document Format  has become a ubiquitous standard for displaying print documents. Adobe greatly contributed to this development by making a free Adobe Acrobat PDF reader available for download.

Image Processing Software:-
In the mid-1980s Adobe’s founders realized that they could further exploit the knowledge of graphics  rendition that they had gained in developing their fonts. They began to create software that would make these capabilities available to illustrators and artists as well as desktop publishers. Their first such product was Adobe Illustrator for the Macintosh, a vector-based drawing program that built upon the graphics capabilities of their PostScript language. In 1989 Adobe introduced Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh. With its tremendous variety of features, the program soon became a standard tool for graphic artists. However, Adobe seemed to have difficulty at first in anticipating the growth of desktop publishing and graphic arts on the Microsoft Windows platform. Much of that market was seized by competitors such as Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress. By the mid-1990s, however, Adobe, fueled by the continuing revenue from its PostScript technology, had acquired both Aldus and Frame Technologies, maker of the popular FrameMaker document design program. Meanwhile PhotoShop continued to develop on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms, aided by its ability to accept add-ons from hundreds of third-party developers .

Multimedia and the Web:-

Adobe made a significant expansion beyond document processing into multimedia with its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005 at a cost of about $3.4 billion. The company has integrated Macromedia’s Flash and Dreamweaver Web-design software into its Creative Suite 3 . Another recent Adobe product that targets Web-based publishing is Digital Editions, which integrated the existing Dreamweaver and Flash software into a powerful but easy-to-use tool for delivering text content and multimedia to Web browsers. Buoyed by these developments, Adobe earned nearly $2 billion in revenue in 2005, about $2.5 billion in 2006, and $3.16 billion in 2007. Today Adobe has over 6,600 employees, with its headquarters in San Jose and offices in Seattle and San Francisco as well as Bangalore, India; Ottawa, Canada; and other locations. In recent years the company has been regarded as a superior place to work, being ranked by Fortune magazine as the fifth best in America in 2003 and sixth best in 2004.