The Story Of Fortune 500 Company Adobe

Adobe, formerly known as Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American computer software company listed as a Fortune 500 company.  Adobe currently ranks 22 on the Fortune 500 list. Adobe has multiple software applications on the market, but the most famous ones are the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Writer and Adobe Photoshop.  The Adobe PDF Reader and Writer is a text editor and viewer software used by almost everyone who owns a smartphone, desktop or a laptop. Adobe Photoshop is a popular image editing and enhancement tool widely used in the digital industry, so much so it has become an industry standard.

Beginning

Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke and it was started in John Warnock’s garage in Los Altos, California.  The name of the Company comes from the Adobe Creek, which used to run behind John Warnock’s house. The founders earlier used to work with the Xerox Corporation before they quit their jobs to start Adobe.  Adobe’s first product was called Postscript, a specialized printing software which became the international standard for computer printing as it included algorithms describing the letter fonts of various languages.

Growth of Adobe

When Adobe put out their Postscript product, Steve Jobs offered to buy Adobe for five million dollars, but was rejected by the founders.  Upon being urged by their investors to work something out with Steve Jobs, they agreed to sell 19 % of shares, for which Jobs paid five times multiple of their valuation at the time.  They were also offered a five year license fee in advance. This made Adobe the first company in the Silicon Valley to become profitable in their first year of business.

In the mid 1980s, Adobe entered the digital market with Illustrator, a vector based drawing program for Apple Macintosh.  Adobe released its first true game changing software called Photoshop for Macintosh, a graphics editing tool. It slowly dominated the market and made its way to the top, so much so it is now an international tool used for image editing.  Adobe also developed and introduced new document format, the Portable Document Format (PDF,) as well as the Adobe Acrobat Reader software. PDF is now an international standard.

Adobe had a revenue of 9 billion dollars as of 2018 and with multiple products in the market, they continue to grow stronger every year.