From Printer Fonts to Photoshop on Your Phone: What Changes Has Adobe Kept Up With in 36 Years? | QDaily Business History

The full version of Photoshop finally reaches mobile next year

The shimmering screen above the main stage went dark, replaced by a familiar image: a white bitten apple on black. The host read out the name of Apple's head of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller.

Schiller walked on from the side of the stage to gasps from the 14,000 people in the hall. Nobody had expected him. Schiller has given more on-stage iPhone demos than anyone since Steve Jobs, but this was not Apple's stage, and Apple executives do not appear at other companies' launch events.

The moment came on October 15, right after Adobe announced at its annual MAX conference that it would bring the full version of Photoshop to the iPad. Over six mild minutes of conversation, Adobe's chief product officer Scott Belsky, who was hosting the conference, and Schiller announced the start of a series of collaborations on creative software.

"Apple and Adobe have a tradition of working together that goes back decades. Together the two companies have made a lot of useful tools for professionals on the Mac and the iPad, and we have both benefited from that great partnership," Schiller said on stage, quoting Jobs twice: "People with passion can change the world," and "We exist at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."

That day fell a full eight years after Jobs wrote that the golden era of Apple and Adobe working closely together had passed, and that Apple had long since gone its separate way.

The on-again, off-again relationship between the two companies fills all 36 years of Adobe's history. Jobs is now dead, and both of Adobe's founders have stepped down from management.

The two companies are patching things up to solve a shared problem: moving design tools onto tablets for real, so that the touchscreen generation — the people who grew up tapping a screen to send messages and watch video — no longer has to go back to a mouse, a keyboard and a drawing tablet to edit a picture. And, of course, so that neither company gets left behind by the young.

"Bringing design software to hardware other than the personal computer, and covering the places people create outside the office" — that, Belsky told a QDaily reporter after the conference, is Adobe's direction for the next stage.

The people Belsky most wants to reach were in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Along with Adobe employees and partners from around the world, there were journalists, designers, and other creative professionals. In the exhibition area below the main hall sat small companies built around Adobe's software, selling plugins and services: Delicious, which makes font plugins; Pantone, which makes color plugins; GoProof, which makes collaboration plugins for creating and socializing at once; and User Testing, which gathers user feedback for Adobe.

QDaily talked at random with a dozen or so attendees. Most had grown up with a mouse and a keyboard and worked in creative jobs — photographers, designers, educators, video producers. Adobe MAX has now run for more than ten years, but many of them were there for the first time.

Had this gathering taken place in 1982, the year Adobe was founded, everyone in the room would have come from the printing and publishing business.

The software industry was born with the personal computer, and Adobe set out to solve publishing's problems

Before 1975, software was something sold bundled with mainframes, minicomputers and workstations; there was no such thing in the tech world as a company that made only software. Then the personal-computer revolution began, Microsoft became the first software company, and one software company after another appeared to serve a different use.

Adobe was born in that era. In 1982 its two founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, left the Xerox research center where they worked and, in a garage, named their new company after a river near John Warnock's childhood home.

Its first customer was Apple, but the product was not the photo editing Adobe later became known for. Back then the fonts on Apple's personal computers were bitmap files: every character was given a set of pixel positions at each size, so blowing it up produced a pile of jagged blocks. That was no problem on the low-resolution monitors of the day. It did not work for print.

Geschke and Warnock had begun chewing on the problem while they were still at the Xerox research center. After proposing a solution to the company and getting nowhere, the two left Xerox and wrote PostScript in a garage. The language could set type beautifully at any size, whatever the resolution of the monitor or the printer. Printed onto film or shown on a screen, the text came out at the same quality.

Jobs soon heard about Adobe and phoned the two founders himself. Later he met them in the garage and said Apple wanted to build a laser printer that supported PostScript.

At that meeting Jobs also invited the two of them to come work at Apple. When they turned him down, he offered to invest $2.5 million in Adobe for a 20% stake. In 1985 Apple put Adobe's PostScript into its first LaserWriter printer, to great success: personal computers went to work in publishing, setting off the revolution known as desktop publishing (DTP). Adobe listed on Nasdaq the following year.

At an Adobe conference today, though, publishing is no longer the product most people use. Say Adobe now and most people think first of a design-software company. That reflex, which has soaked into mainstream culture, comes mainly from the popularity of Photoshop and the rest of the design line.

Through a string of acquisitions, Adobe made "photoshop" a verb

Daniel Flores and his wife run a nonprofit in Atlanta called Art Is King, teaching local young people and adults how to use Illustrator. Illustrator is the illustration software Adobe built in 1987 for publishing, multimedia and online image production. Flores first used it in 2001. It was the first Adobe product he ever touched, and it is still the tool he uses most.

"When inspiration comes, I sketch something quickly in Adobe Photoshop Sketch, then bring the drawing into Adobe Draw, which shows it to me in more organic, more traditional color that I can work on. Finally I import the revised drawing into Adobe Illustrator to add everything else and produce the final piece," Flores said. Adobe's range of products, he said, lets him finish a piece of work inside one connected ecosystem.

All of Adobe's software falls into four categories: Creative & Design; Marketing & Analytics; PDF & E-Signatures; and Business Solutions. Creative & Design alone holds 53 pieces of software, covering drawing, photo editing, post-production, video editing, visual effects and AR. Together they form a complete loop for making things.

When Adobe entered its different markets

1982

Adobe is founded

1985

The PostScript language goes into Apple's first laser printer

1987

Adobe releases Illustrator, a drawing tool

1989

Adobe buys the distribution rights to Photoshop, a photo-editing tool

1993

Adobe releases Acrobat, a tool for making PDF documents

1993

In Adobe's earnings, software profit passes PostScript font-licensing profit for the first time

1994

Adobe buys Aldus

1996

Adobe releases PhotoDeluxe, the "easy" version of Photoshop

2000

The two founders retire

2001

Adobe releases InDesign

2003

Adobe bundles all its design software into Adobe Creative Suite, unifying the brand and selling it as a package

2005

Adobe buys Macromedia, then its largest rival, for $3.4 billion, acquiring Flash, Dreamweaver and other products

2007

Shantanu Narayen becomes Adobe's CEO

2008

Photoshop Express, a web version of Photoshop, is released

2009

Adobe buys the enterprise analytics company Omniture

2012

Adobe launches Creative Cloud (CC), a cloud service users can subscribe to by the month

2013

Adobe pushes its shift to cloud subscriptions with everything it has, announcing that the Creative Suite package will no longer be updated

2015

Document Cloud goes live

2017

Experience Cloud and Advertising Cloud go live

2017

Adobe says it will stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020

2018

Adobe says the full version of Photoshop for iOS will arrive in 2019

Of all this software, Photoshop is still the most famous, because over the past three decades it has changed how art gets made.

Albert Watson, the celebrated photographer who shot the cover portrait for Steve Jobs, came to this year's conference to speak up for Photoshop, saying it changed how photographs get made. In 1992, before Photoshop had caught on, Watson set out to shoot Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and a jaguar together in a car. That meant putting the man and the big cat in the same vehicle with nothing between them but a length of barrier. The jaguar was fierce, and Watson feared for Jagger's life, so in the end he made the picture by double-exposing a single roll of film: he photographed the jaguar first, drew the outline of the cat's shape on the camera's viewfinder, wound the film back, and photographed Jagger.

In the end Rolling Stone did not run that "joint portrait" of Jagger and the jaguar in the car. It ran another Watson picture, an accident: Jagger's face and the jaguar's face line up exactly, so the animal appears to have human eyes and human lips. The image looks today as though it was made in Photoshop, but Watson made it the same traditional way, with a double exposure — except that chance did most of the work, since the photograph could not exist if the human face had not happened to fall precisely on the cat's.

Work that once meant risking your life, or waiting on luck, can now be done easily in Photoshop. That, for Watson, was the shock Adobe's products delivered. "I never fell for digital cameras, but ten years ago I started learning to use computers. I realized Photoshop broke down the boundaries of photography as an art — it freed photographers' imaginations and made artistic creation more possible, more magical."

Like most professionals who lived through the shift from analog to digital, though, Watson warned the young people in the audience not to let the tool sit above the idea. "I know you were born into a digital environment, but remember not to let the tool take you hostage. A lot of young photographers lean on Photoshop. They don't shoot properly, and they wait to fix it in Photoshop afterward. Do that and the value of the idea never shows."

"The idea should come before the tool. First the idea, then the tool," Watson said.

Adobe's software changed the design and photography businesses, and it changed how people see beauty. All of it started with one acquisition. In 1989 Adobe bought the distribution rights to Photoshop from the Knoll brothers, the software's designers. Twenty years later Photoshop had more than 10 million users worldwide. A 2015 study found that 68% of adults photoshop a picture before showing it to anyone — and the word "photoshop" itself comes from Photoshop.

Whether or not you are a professional photographer, whether or not you know how to use Photoshop, whether you use Meitu, FaceTune or PS, "photoshopping" is now the word for retouching a picture.

Flash was one software company's ambition to control the standards of the internet. Years of conflict between two companies killed it

Ten years ago, Flash was unavoidable at any Adobe conference. Ten years later, three days of sessions at Adobe MAX went by without a single mention of it.

When Flash was born in 1996, it looked like a rising star of the web. In the Web 1.0 era, HTML could do very little. Web pages were mostly crude blocks of text, images often came at mosaic-grade resolution, an animated GIF could easily run to several megabytes, and on the dial-up connections of the day video was a thing that never finished loading.

Small, efficient and cross-platform, Flash was for a while seen as the hope that would rescue the early internet. In a file of only a few dozen to a few hundred kilobytes, it could show vector color animation that stayed sharp at any size, and it supported high-quality MP3 audio streams, text input fields, interactive interfaces and much more, drawing in developers who used it to make games and animation.

BlackBerry, the PS3, the PSP, the Wii, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android all joined the camp supporting Flash. On the strength of this "universal plugin," Adobe looked for a while like it might become a new platform sitting atop the internet's standards.

By the turn of the millennium China already had a mass of video, animation, game and image sites built on Flash. Middle schools began teaching students to make Flash animations in computer class, and the Chinese developers who loved Flash called themselves shanke, "flash guests," growing over time into an internet subculture of their own.

What finally toppled the trend was Apple — more precisely, the will of one man, Steve Jobs. Not long after investing in Adobe and pushing the printer project, Jobs was thrown out of Apple. The two companies had their fight over fonts afterward, but the Mac, which held the U.S. education and creative-industry markets, remained the first platform for Adobe's design software: Illustrator, Photoshop, PageMaker, FrameMaker and the rest all shipped on the Mac first, with Windows versions following.

In 1996, when word got out that Jobs was returning to Apple, John Warnock backed him publicly in the press: "I think he's coming back to fix things with a kind of vengeance. In his years at NeXT [the company Jobs founded after leaving Apple] he matured — I've never seen him this mature before."

But Jobs's return also began the rupture between the two companies. In 2001 he launched OS X to replace the aging Mac OS, and called on software companies himself to win their support. Microsoft moved Internet Explorer and Office to OS X immediately. Adobe took two years to port Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator and its other products. The same conflict played out again when Apple switched to Intel chips.

Burt Janz, president of the design firm Nashua, said at the time: "Apple's market share keeps shrinking, so it's hardly unreasonable that Adobe made this choice."

By 2010, when Adobe was pushing Flash hard, Apple had the iPhone 4 and the iPad and was no longer the underdog. Not only did it flatly refuse to let Flash onto the iPhone, Jobs also wrote the essay Thoughts on Flash, counting off Flash's sins one by one: open in name but closed in practice, advanced in name but backward in practice, secure in name but dangerous in practice, heavy on battery, poor on touchscreens. At the end, Jobs wrote that Adobe should perhaps spend more time developing HTML5, which is good for the future, and less time faulting Apple for forgetting old ties.

Adobe hit back at Jobs, accusing him of blocking free competition. Besides the essay Our Thoughts on Open Markets by Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, whose title echoed Jobs's own, Adobe ran its famous "We Love Apple. We Love Freedom More" ads.

Right up until Jobs died, the iPhone never opened its door to Flash. Over the following years Flash's weaknesses — slow, bloated, insecure — kept surfacing, and it lost supporter after supporter.

iPhone and Mac users are still not the majority, but there are now too many of them for any website to ignore. Faced with Apple's firm either-or, website developers gradually dropped Flash. Android, Chrome and Microsoft Edge all dropped support for it too.

In July 2017, Adobe formally announced that it would stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020.

One interesting detail: before joining Apple in 1997 to run marketing, Phil Schiller — the man who took Adobe's stage this time — was vice president of product marketing at Macromedia. The year before he left, Macromedia bought Flash from its original developer, FutureWave. In 2005 Adobe acquired Flash by buying Macromedia, and set off the war with Apple.

Like every company from the PC era, Adobe faces the problem of how to get young again

Along with the iPad version of Photoshop coming next year, Adobe also released Premiere Rush CC, its first video-editing software for phones, on the day of the conference.

Moving the way you handle design software from the mouse to the fingertip is another Adobe reinvention. It is also a reaction.

Long before Adobe's products reached phones and tablets, countless small companies had pulled their features apart one by one. HDR, which once meant shooting RAW files on a camera and then working on them in Photoshop or Lightroom, now comes built into nearly every phone. Blemish removal, leg-lengthening, skin-whitening, filters — the Photoshop tricks no portrait studio could do without — can now be had from at least a hundred phone apps.

Apple's own user-experience designers once built every interface prototype for the first iPhone's software in Adobe Director. Today dozens of prototyping tools let a beginner product manager or designer put together an interactive interface that looks the part.

For professional photographers, illustrators and serious amateurs who grew up on a mouse and keyboard, Adobe's tools on the Mac and the PC are still the most effective. But more people are used to solving one specific problem with one phone app. A few years earlier, all of them would have been potential Adobe users.

Try the video-editing app Premiere Rush CC and it looks a lot like a slimmed-down Premiere. For a genuinely professional editor, Premiere alone is more than enough, and cutting video with a mouse will always be faster than cutting it with a finger. So Adobe's intent is plain.

It needs software that is easier to get and easier to pick up in order to draw in a new generation of young users, even if that software cannot do half of what the desktop design software does. It is easier to pull video from a user's camera roll, and easier for them to share the result to social networks, and that is set to become an important chance for Adobe to win new users.

Many of the features added to Adobe Creative Cloud this year also rest on Adobe Sensei, the company's in-house artificial-intelligence platform — making image work more automatic and lowering the barrier to learning.

New buying habits are challenging Adobe's old way of selling software, too.

In 2003 Adobe released the Creative Suite design package, selling users expensive boxed software in a bundle. By the time the Creative Suite line stopped being updated ten years later, the full set cost $2,500 — more than many people's computers.

But in 2009 Adobe ended the era of boxed software with subscriptions and Creative Cloud, and dropped the cost of entry from $2,500 in one go to $50 a month. For someone who only needs Photoshop plus Lightroom, the minimum is under $10 a month.

As subscription fees have climbed, Adobe has stopped putting out new versions of many products for non-subscribers. "Looking at the price, we're actually spending more," one enterprise Creative Cloud customer told QDaily. "Because it used to be a one-time purchase, and now you pay and pay." Daniel Flores, the artist who teaches Adobe software to adult students in his community, said: "For some of my students the price really may be a bit high. I tell them to apply for a student account — it saves them $20."

Natasha Jen, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has never worked out how much she has spent on Adobe software. "Adding that up would be like adding up how much I've paid in electricity bills over the past ten years. I can't do the sum, and I don't think about it." Buying Adobe software, Jen said, is like buying coffee: she is used to reaching for her wallet whenever she needs it.

The new way of buying appears to have won users over. Adobe's third-quarter earnings this year show Creative Cloud brought in $1.36 billion, 60% of total revenue. By revenue model, subscriptions — Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud together — account for nearly 90%, while traditional product sales and business support make up only about 10%. Since it began shifting to subscriptions in 2009, Adobe's share price has risen more than tenfold.

The world's ten most valuable software companies, most of them makers of business software

1

Microsoft, market cap $801.674 billion

2

Oracle, market cap $179.771 billion

3

SAP, market cap $128.317 billion

4

Adobe, market cap $118.953 billion

5

Salesforce.com, market cap $102.866 billion

6

VMware, market cap $58.140 billion

7

Intuit, market cap $53.175 billion

8

Autodesk, market cap $27.821 billion

9

CA Technologies, market cap $18.324 billion

10

Citrix, market cap $13.683 billion

More than 10,000 people came to this year's Adobe MAX, among them a great many diehard Adobe fans and creative people of every kind. Nearly every panel and session was full, and even on the last day few walked out early. At the evening reception, tight security slowed entry so much that the line stretched more than a kilometer in the night air, filling two whole Los Angeles streets and winding into an open-air parking lot, with people standing in the driving lanes.

The world is much bigger than one launch event, though. It will not be many years before the users who grew up with a keyboard, a mouse and a drawing tablet grow old. The generation raised on touchscreens will grow up and become the next generation of photographers and designers. Every tool that once took for granted that you would sit down in front of a computer will have to meet them where they are.

Belsky said more than once that the iPad version of Photoshop coming next year will be a real Photoshop. But is it the "photoshop it" that the new generation wants?

Cover image / Visual China Group. December 1982: John Warnock (left) and Charles Geschke announce the founding of Adobe.