The History of Adobe

If you were to hear the word Adobe 50 years ago, you probably would have automatically thought of the clay building material. However, in the last twenty five years or so, Adobe has come to mean something completely different. If you own a computer or have ever been online, there is little doubt that you have come across an Adobe product at some point or another. Known formally as Adobe Systems Incorporated, Adobe is simply a computer software company that is based in San Jose, California. This company has spent it’s lifetime up to this point focusing on the creation of creativity and multimedia software products. More recently they have been delving into internet application software development, which has been gaining steady ground in the last few years.

Adobe Systems INC was founded by Charles Geschke and John Warnock in December of 1982. The two creators established adobe after leaving Xerox PARC. This was in order to develop and sell their PostScript page description language. Apple Computers licensed that post script in 1985 for use in their LaserWriter printers. This helped bring about the desktop publishing revolution. The company got its name because there was a creek named Adobe Creek that ran directly behind the house of one of the company’s creators. Adobe was a former competitor to Macromedia, but it managed to acquire that company in December of 2005, and add newer platforms and software products to its product portfolio, including Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash.

Adobe Systems Incorporated has major development operations in San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Newton, Massachusetts; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Ottawa, Ontario; Hamburg, Germany; San Luis Obispo, California; Bucharest, Romania; Noida, India; and Bangalore, India. Somewhere around 40% of its entire work force resides in San Jose, California, and as of January 2007, the company had around 6,677 employees and steadily growing.  In fact, Adobe Systems Incorporated has been ranked as one of the most outstanding places to work by Fortune magazine ever since 1995. It was also rated the 5th best company to work for in the United States in 2003, it ranked 6th in 2004, the 31st in 2007, the 40th in 2008, and the 11th in 2009. Adobe also ranked the 9th largest software company in the world in 2007. India ranked it as the 19th greatest place to work in 2008. In 2008, it was featured in Maclean’s newsmagazine, and ranked one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers.

Each year, Adobe Systems Incorporated continues to release new products as well as improvements to products past. In 2008 alone, they released the Adobe Media player which included many tutorials and videos that were available for training or entertainment, they discontinued further sales and development of any older GoLive  HTML web developing software in favor of the newer Dreamweaver software, which of course was offered with a discount to former users of GoLive who still use the older program, they launched Acrobat.com, which is a series of web applications that are geared towards collaborative work, and they launched the Adobe Creative Suite 4, which includes Web, Design, Master Collection and Production Premium, which came out in six different configurations at varying prices. Unfortunately, as the United States headed into one of the worst economies in several years, Adobe would not come out of it unscathed, as they had to lay off nearly 600 employees due to the weak economic situation.