Adobe Systems Incorporated develops, markets, and supports computer software products and technologies that enable users to create, display, manage, communicate, and print electronics documents. Based in Mountain View, California, the company is the No. 3 PC software vender (in 1995 sales revenue) behind Microsoft and Novell. John E. Warnock is the Chairman and CEO, and Charles M. Geschke is the President. Adobe licenses its technology to major computer, printing, and publishing suppliers, and markets a line of application software products and type products for authoring and editing visually rich documents.
Adobe distributes its products through a network of original equipment manufacturer ("OEM") customers, distributors and dealers, and value-added resellers ("VARs") and system integrators. It has operations in the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. Adobe, whose PostScript computer language made desktop publishing a reality in the mid-1980s, is hoping to ride its Internet software toward success in the late 1990s. Its Adobe PageMill and Adobe SiteMill programs help users easily create a word-processing-like program into files the computer could use to construct the site.
Adobe grew in the early 1990s by acquiring other software companies, including OCR Systems and Nonlinear Technologies (1992), AH Software and Science & Art (1993). Also in 1993 the company began licensing its PostScript software to printer manufacturers so they could use it in their products, which upped adobe’s share of the market. That year it began marketing Acrobat software, which enables users to create and distribute electronic documents over computer networks or online. Aldus Corporation was acquired in 1994. The merger was accounted for by the pooling of interests method, and accordingly, all annual and interim financial information prior to the merger has been restated to combine the results of Adobe and Aldus. In connection with the merger, Adobe recorded $14.6 million of merger transaction costs and $57.6 million of restructuring costs in the fourth quarter.
Adobe’s major competitors, besides IBM and Microsoft, are Autodesk (1995 Sales $465.3 million), SoftKey International (1995 Sales $167 million), and Macromedia (1995 Sales $53.7 million).
Autodesk is a San Rafael, CA-based firm #1 in the design-automation software market. Autodesk’s flagship product, AutoCAD, is a software tool used primarily by architects and mechanical engineers to perform design, modeling, drafting, mapping, and rendering. CEO Carol Bartz has begun to broaden the company’s focus to include geographic information systems (GIS) and multimedia in an effort to end its vulnerability to earnings swings associated with the life cycle of each AutoCAD release.
SoftKey is a Cambridge, MA-based company, who has gone after acquisitions with a vengeance, adding software publishers such as Compton’s NewMedia and the Learning Company to its team. It’s a leading publisher of consumer software. Known for its mass-marketing approach, SoftKey packages and displays some programs in racks like music CDs.
Macromedia is a San Francisco-based company whose authoring software tools are used to combine video, graphics, sound, and text into multimedia applications and to create printed materials. Macromedia ended fiscal 1996 with revenues of $116.7 million, more than double the previous year’s sales.
An interesting try: See an Adobe file.
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