The Adobe Story, Part Two

and became Adobe Systems Incorporated. Now, now, when you mix the mud with the water, you wanted to kind of Adobe, that kind of Adobe. I'm gonna need some new notes. Okay, Well, Chris is gonna go bye bye for a little while. Uh No. So yeah, Adobe, of course, at this point in its existence, was really really focused on top publishing and desktop video editing software and getting into some other arenas as well. They're starting to look into three D rendering.

They were looking into developing things for web pages, which you know, in the early nineties, the web is in its infancy, it's it's hasn't really taken off yet. Uh and and also into other venues as well. So Adobe starting to branch out beyond the traditional font management software that it had kind of cut its teeth on. Well, we're looking at a time when there was still a

lot of fragmentation out there. Sure, you know, we we talk on on tech stuff a lot about older technologies, just because I think it kind of puts what we have now into a lot of context. UM. We've talked in the past about the main frames that they used to use before the Internet really hooked everything up, and all these different machines used different operating systems, they use

different programming languages. UM and UH. One of the one of the things one of the reasons if you especially if you haven't listened to UH to the first episode of the Adobe UH two parter um, one of the reasons that the founders of Adobe decided to branch out from their work at Xerox Park was they wanted to create technologies that would enable people to standardize UM specifically in this case for publishing the purposes of print publishing.

But UM, they you you will find that as we're talking, especially in this second part of the podcast, that the the technologies and formats that Adobe has created have really done that. UM. And this is a time in the in the mid es when we're moving from UH. You know, the Macintosh operating system is moving forward, UM the UH you know, some of the other different competitors have fallen out, a tar st has gone by this point for the most part, UM Amigas has long since UH foundered and

been saved and founder again, etcetera. UM. So it's really sort of a a two part race for the most part. The people who are using uh PCs based on IBM S technologies and UM and people who are using the Mac and and as Jonathan alluded to in the previous episode, the Mac people right now are still sort of designers. You know. That's if you're going to be doing desktop publishing, you need to Mac. But Adobe was smart and hedging

its bets. They started producing software for the Windows operating System. More people have used I mean OS two. The IBM UM operating system is kind of fallen off by this period too, so UM that that was the right horse to back was the Windows Operating System. And with Windows three point x and then Windows ninety five around the time we're starting to talk about it's really becoming a situation where that the technologies are are getting more similar

than dissimilar. And of course, uh, you know, already we had the whole model of the enterprise leaning toward Windows based machines as opposed to Mac machines. So with entire companies uh investing in Windows PCs, it meant that, you know, you wanted to make sure you you catered to that

particular market as well. There were going to be a lot of Windows PC machines out there, and a lot of businesses do some form of publishing, whether it's for internal documents or it's an actual company that produces stuff that will go to external clients or customers. So yeah, it was very important for Adobe to look into that, and in they went on something of a bit of

an acquisition spree. They acquired a company called Visual where uh they acquired a Seneca Communications which made website creation tools like I said, you know, early days of the web, and Adobe saying we need to get into this. They acquired hyphen which was a printer software company. Uh. And they they acquired frame Technology, which created a software called FrameMaker UM which was all about producing and manipulating large

structured documents. Now, if you aren't a technical writer. This might not sound terribly interesting, but if you are a technical writer and you have to create long, complicated technical documents, something like FrameMaker which would allow you to produce those and and uh switch things around, uh relatively painlessly, that's a big deal. You know, you're talking about very complex documents. I know people who have used FrameMaker. Yeah, they would.

They would probably take exception to your your painless painlessly. Yeah, I realized that painless is again your mileage may very tight term, just like open was in our last episode. But the goal of FrameMaker at any rate was to make this easier for large complex documents, to manipulate those. Uh. Whether or not it succeeded was probably more of a case by case basis. Well, when you put it, when you put it in terms of what people had to do to create those same kinds of documents before computers

were on everyone's desktop, Uh, it's considerably painlessly. Yeah, much much easier. At that same time, they began to license a programming language created by Sun Microsystems called Java, and they were licensing it with the intent on integrating it with their Adobe Acrobat product. So, uh, Java is not an Adobe product. It came from Sun Microsystems, but Adobe did license it for some of its own products. They also ended a licensing agreement that year they ended the

agreement with Photoshop. They decided to cut that license because they decided to buy Photoshop outright for thirty five and a half million dollars. So that pet project of Thomas Knowles, who created his display software program a few years before, turned out to be quite a windfall for him. The thirty half thirty five and a half million dollar deal with Adobe after after a fairly lucrative licensing agreement. So uh,

it was. It was. It was one of those right place to be during the right time kind of situations, you know. And then also that year, Acrobat becomes integrated with a browser called Netscape. New listeners, young listeners might not be familiar with the name Netscape, but Netscape at one time was a dominant web browser. Um you had essentially you had two web browsers battling it out for supremacy.

There was Netscape and there was Internet Explorer, and then Internet Explorer kind of one for a while, and then other browsers rose up to a challenge Internet Explorer. But Netscape was a big name back in the day, there were there were there were other browsers, quite a few of the UM, most of which you really will never hear of. Right, the market share for those was tiny in comparison, and and that's really thanks in large part to Microsoft because um Netscape was a paid product back then.

If you wanted the Netscape web browser, you forked over money because I know this because I did that. And then Microsoft released Internet Explorer for free. Yeah. Also, this was the same era when Internet Explorer and Windows were so tightly integrated that it caused problems for Microsoft in the court systems where they were talking about Microsoft kind of unfairly biasing everything toward Internet Explorer so that you would effectively not have a choice trying to become a

monopoly in the browser world. That's a totally different story though, so we don't really need to go into that, but it's just interesting background with what's going on during the time that Adobe is making all these acquisitions and licensing agreements. Uh, they release more updates to their product line. I'm not going to go into all of them because frankly, it would take several episodes and I'm not sure that it

would be that interesting. I will say that they did release the first edition of page Mill, which was, according to the box, the easiest way to create pages for the World Wide Web, because that's what we used to call it, and I and to that, I would just say, well,

maybe back then it was the easiest. I mean, do you you remember having to create a web page by coding it in in HTML and then saving the htmail document, then opening up a browser, opening the h Gmail document, looking at it, say that's not the way I wanted to be. Close out the browser, reopened the HTML editor, go back into it and change another line of HTML. I say, code, but it's really a mark up language.

Um yeah, they that was a pain. Yeah, well, well this this if you wanted to get into the Web, and lots and lots of people did. At this point. It was it was being likened to the Great land Rush type thing where the West, yeah, the wild West, or or space. You know, it's it's wide open and anybody can do this, and people wanted to learn how to do this, and you kind of had two choices, which you we still really do, but uh, it was

less familiar to people at that time. So you either learned how you bought a book on how to code HTML, or you got software to help you with this, like for example, Page mill or um uh front page, I remember front Page. And you know, there were there were there were situations where you you'd go, Okay, well I'm just gonna go ahead and uh, you know, bite the bullet and go ahead and buy a program to help me do this. And it worked some of the time.

And at other times you look in the code and if you knew anything about the code, you go, what's that? You know, why is why is it injecting all this stuff that really doesn't it's not necessary for me to

align my text to the left. It was, you know, it was the attempt of the early software the software engineers to um, you know, make an attempt to make coding easier for HTML users, and eventually this would develop into whizzywig editors, which of course is the what you see is what you get where you know, the all the coding part is hidden away from you, so you don't have to pay attention to it. You just see the representation of it on your screen and you move

things around to where you want them. And saw a lot of web development tools are these days now grant most of them also allow you to go into the H T M L if you want to do it the old fashioned way or you want to tweak things very specifically, and you don't you know, you want to do it via code as opposed to clicking and dragging something on a screen. But yeah, this is this kind

of predates the whole wizzy Wig stuff. Yeah, well and until Macromedia comes out with, um with dream Weaver, which is I believe you can we can make it through the night. Well, dream Weaver is a is a sort of best of both worlds sort of situation where you can do wizzy Wig editing, but you can also really get into the code. Actually, there was a company called go Live that also came out with a similar program.

So go Live and uh and Macromedia we're coming out with these advanced HTML editors and will play a part in the story. And and dream Weaver and um, I'm sorry, and uh, page Mill, well, page Mill is now sitting in deep in the ground where it was stomped. Yeah, but that's okay because Adobe, even though perhaps its own product did not win out in that war h Adobe

still stood tall. And we'll get into why. But there their revenue that year because I was doing revenue in the previous ones, I'm not gonna do this every single year. It was seven hundred sixty two millions. So they're creeping up on a billion dollars in revenue. They had over two thousand employees at this point, two thousand two. Uh. And then the next year in ninety, Adobe acquired a company called Swell Software. Yeah, so they developed web server software.

And they also acquired a company called Aries Software, which was another font scaling company. If you listen to part one, you probably heard us talk about Adobe buying every font scaling company that seemed to come come into existence, because again that was very uh much part of their their focus with desktop publishing and electronic publishing in general. Then you have two D scale the fonts if you want

to eat them. So then after that, after that, Adobe all so decided to spin off one of its divisions. They had this whole prep press application software company spinoff that they called Luminous Corporation, and Adobe Systems Incorporated relocates.

Yet again, Now, if you listen again to the previous episode, you heard about them getting a start in Mountain View and then moving to Palo Alto, and then moving back to Mountain View, and now they're making their move to where they where Adobe headquarters are today, which is well, you know the way, it's San Jose, do do do? Anyway, So they go to San Jose, California, and uh, moving on to nineties seven more acquisitions, which it's kind of amazing if you look at Adobe's history and you look

at all the companies that's acquired. I never realized how many companies Adobe butt. I think of companies like Google, which I think of as being pretty you know, at least during certain eras of Google's history, they they've swept up quite a few companies. Uh. And then there are other companies that are in Microsoft has done the same sort of thing. It's brought up several smaller companies. But I never really thought of Adobe being one of those.

I knew about them making some major acquisitions and matures, but I didn't realize how many how many companies Adobe acquired, I mean it was a lot. So yeah, nine seven Sandcastle which was a two way internet communication company, Digi Docs, which was a personalized PDF creation software company. Uh, fine Point which was web graphics software company. I mean they every year, it seems like they're they're acquiring at least two or three companies kind of kind of uh interesting

and scary. Well, um, this is around the time when Macromedia was really uh putting the hurt on Adobe because um in h is when they introduced Flash. So you know, Adobe really had no uh, no concrete answer for how um for software like flash, which is still today one of the most popular ways of providing rich Internet content, especially now that that broadband technology is uh is so common.

And I would even argue that Flash in some ways probably had an effect on broadband becoming more popular because with more interactive and interesting content with the ability to to create that using Macromedia Flash, UM, that made having faster Internet speeds more compelling because there was something to get um and it was it was that next year in where where Macromedia came out with dream Weaver to

to create web pages. So um, you know Adobe is is even though it's a you know, the number two software firm in the world, behind only Microsoft, in um, it's there's still places that can improve. And they also that year launched the NOIDA Research and Development Center, So this was a division specifically to you know, they would they would dedicate resources to the center to try and find new and innovative ways to improve either existing products

or come up with brand new products. So in a way, this is kind of Adobe's version of Park, which of course is what the two founders of Adobe. What the world that they came out of. Uh So, now and they have a new employee, uh a fellow who originally came from India, And so I'm going to completely butcher the pronunciation of his name, and I apologize for that because I it's my cultural illiteracy, and that's the only reason. But Shantanu Narayan, who joins Adobe as the VP and

General Manager of Engineering Technology Group. I he was a former executive at Apple and then after that he was the founder of a digital photo sharing company, Pictra Incorporated. It was actually one of the first companies to look into digital photo sharing. Anyway, this man will become very important to Adobe in the future. He was He also has a meteorc rise. He may have heard of us talking about chisen Um having a meteorc rise as well.

Throughout these years, he is steadily climbing the executive ladder over at Adobe. Well that year Adobe Ship's image ready one an image Styler one, along with updates to pretty much everything else in its software suite. Um. And we move on to ninety nine and we talked about go Live again. That was the company you were talking about earlier, Chris. Yeah, it was basically the competition to dream Leaver, right. So Adobe is like, hey, I know how we can compete.

Let's buy go Live. So they did. So go Live created this macweb authoring tool, and uh, Adobe sweeps them up. Um. They also acquired Attitude Software, which was a three D technologies company. UH, photo Merge, which was a photo stitching software company. Photo stitching, for those who do not know, that is the software that allows you to take multiple photographs and then merge them together to make one image. There are a lot of companies that do this, but

photo Merged was one of them. In Adobe jumped on that opportunity. UH. That year, they shipped a product called document Server one. This was a pretty important piece of software. It's not something that you would have purchased as just an average computer owner. But what document server one allowed UH people to do is if you if you installed this on a server, it would allow folks to view PDF files through a browser without first having to download

Adobe Acrobat Reader or some other clients software. That's the way it had to be done. Previously, you would you know, the browser itself was not capable of displaying PDF without a plug in, essentially, so you had to get Adobe Acrobat Reader before this. Now, what this software did was on the server side, so it's not client side. You

didn't have to have it on your personal machine. On the server side and installed the software that would convert PDF documents into JEFF or jpeg formats and then so on. You know, those are file formats that any browser could display. So your browser would be able to show the JEFF or jpeg version of a PDF document, so you're not looking at the true PDF version, you're looking at an image of it. Um But that meant that you didn't have to install something additional into your browser of choice.

They also shipped a product called active Share, which was software that had sort of a simplified photo editing suite of tools, and it was men for the average user, because a lot of the Adobe products previous to this point were meant for people who were specialists. You know, we're talking about photography specialists or are people who you know,

it's they're living to retouch photos, that kind of thing. Well, they needed tools that had a lot of sophistication, and sometimes with sophistication comes complexity, which is a barrier for an average user, someone who doesn't do this for a living, someone who's who's interested in it, but they don't have the expertise to you know, if you if you hand them a tool chest that has a thousand tools in it, it's just overwhelming. So this was Adobe's attempt to kind

of address a different market. We're talking about the average consumer and say, look, this software will let you share your photos and you can even do some simple touch ups. Most of it automated, so that way it wasn't too intimidating for the average user. UM and they shipped a product called press Ready, which was a publishing tool for in jet printers. And nine was the first year that Adobe hit the one billion dollar revenue mark. M so big year for Adobe. Yeah, and I remember in in

Design came out. UM that was you know then the basically sort of the the update, if you will, although it wasn't an update to PageMaker, which it bought from all this or when it acquired all of this. UM and uh, you know there it was still uh, it was still a little different from from PageMaker at that At that point, Adobe's PageMaker was going up against Cork with its Cork Express software and those two were the

big publishing uh platforms of choice. And then in design was you know, Adobe says, you know, this is brand new, written from the ground up. It's going to take over the world. It's it's much better than than our old stuff. It's much better than their stuff. And you know, right out of the gate, maybe not, but that would go on to uh to do very very well, and they

eventually would phase out the PageMaker right yep. In two thousand they are ranked as number forty two Unfortune's Best Companies list, which was a point of pride for them. They acquired a company called glass Book, which was they created software for reading, creating and deploying e books. So another big move we're talking about now. Again, e publishing was always something Adobe was interested in, but now we're talking about e books in particular. This is definitely the

early days of the books two thousand. Uh, it was CD screens really a niche market, not not doing a lot of business in this but Adobe kind of could see the writing on the tablet and uh, sorry to get into it. This was also another another monumental year for Adobe in the sense that there was a big change at the top. Warnock and Gesh became co chairman of the Board of Directors and Bruce Chisen became the

CEO of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Yeah, he retired from his his typical post and went on to U you know, to join the board and sort of step down from the day to day stuff. So. Um. Adobe also shipped a product called live Motion one, which was product that was all about web graphics and animation software, and uh, a publication management and collaboration tool called in Scope one, and um, yeah, so they're again they're diversifying a bit.

So it's not just digital publishing for static documents, but also yet more web page publication tools. Yeah. And a focus on cross platform to which uh you know has has been for and from where we are now the focus for many years, you know, building formats and and and uh making tools to create those those formats that will work on Windows and Macintosh computers both. Yeah. So

that way, no matter who argues ATOBEE still wins. UM two thousand one, another huge year, a artificially intelligent computer by the name of how started to off space explorers one by one because of the problem. Okay, now my notes are wrong. No, In two thousand one, they made a big deal with a a major retail establishment, Barnes and Noble. So the deal was that they would start to sell electronic books in PDF format through Barnes and Noble.

So again a little early for that, but it was, you know, that sort of seeing what the future was going to be in the publication industry, so that was kind of an interesting They also, of course, you know, we can't go a year without them acquiring somebody, so they acquired the company called Fativa, which was a digital photography saw were company, and they also began to license software from Sonic Solutions Technology. Sonic Solutions Technology was a

company that created DVD authoring software. So now we're getting into not just publication for the web or for the desktop, or even hard copy paper documentation with you know, the PostScript printer stuff. We're talking about creating DVDs. So they also they also shipped special versions of Acrobat Reader for a couple of different formats, and this is I'm mentioning this just to see Chris's reaction. Uh, this was the year two tho one when they shipped Acrobat Reader for

palm Os. I have a little moment of silence for palm Os. Alright, that's enough, Um, you know you. Yeah, we've done an episode on Palm and we've done an episode on HP. So if you really want to know the whole grizzly story about Palm, well it was. It's sort of again, it's sort of a foreshadowing of how important the mobile market would end up being. Yeah, this is again a very early entry into the mobile market.

We're talking about back in the days of the personal digital assistant days, So we have personal digital assistance for those of you who don't remember, are smartphones without the phone, who would do that? But in general, that's kind of what it was. So yeah, this was an idea of well,

let's let's let's create a version of Acrobat Reader. They will work on a mobile device, so that way you can load a document on a mobile device and take it with you and you don't have to have a computer to set up so that you can read whatever the document is. Uh. And in two thousand two they

celebrated their twentieth anniversary. Oh yes, and they also acquired a company, um, a Chilio or a Celio, depending on I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but they was a company that made web enabled electronic forms, and specifically these forms were designed to improve business processes. So that's his exciting as it sounds, yes, but it's very important.

It's very lucrative, right, um. Yeah, and and uh and also in two thousand one, by the way, I have listed that John Warnock retired officially from day to day operations of the company, so the founders are no longer doing the every day Actually they probably were, but but just for frenzies. Uh So, moving onto two thousand three. At two thousand three, they hit their peak as far as I can tell anyway, on the Fortune's Best One lists,

they rose all the way to number five. So they had been appearing on the list year after year, but if I'm not mistaken, I believe two thousand three was when they got as high up on the list as they've ever been. They also, of course, guess what they did, acquired a company, yes, Centrillium, which was a digital audio tool company, and they also acquired a company called Yellow Dragon Technology, which was again all be getting into a business.

Very early on, Yellow Dragon Technology created x m L messaging and metadata management software, so x m L Extensible Markup Language was something developed to make web pages a more rich medium because HTML had certain limitations that it was not really able to go beyond without additional stuff supporting it, and XML in a way is one of the many things that kind of bolstered HTML. Also made it easier to do things like the metadata menada is

very important. Mentadata kind of tells a computer program what the content of a particular document, whether it's web page or uh you know, a document like a like you know, just something that you're creating on a computer. It gives the computer information about what that documents about or how to uh sw that document and this this becomes really important in lots of different applications. The one that a lot of people refer to because it's a very easy

illustration is search. So if you are searching for stuff and the search program looks through meta data to try and find documents that relate to whatever your search terms are, you need to have a really good meta data management system in order to make sure people are finding your stuff when they're searching for it. Um. Because this this

can make or break a business. Yeah. It was especially important in the earlier days of the web when the search engine uh spiders, which is basically a piece of software that goes from page to page on the Internet. They were less sophisticated than they are now um at at reading the content on the page and determining context from from the way the content is marked up in HTML or or you know, some form of XML so um or PHP um so h yeah, there are others

um but um. But yeah, I mean it's sort of relied on people marking up a page under and in the code that you wouldn't necessarily see with tags that they wanted to be associated with meta information and uh so this this was a very important uh you know, business to being involved in at that point. Granted, people started to figure out ways to gain the system by putting in irrelevant information and sta data so that they

would get lots of traffic. Uh it wouldn't necessarily be productive traffic because people would go to the page and say, this is not what I was looking for at all. Uh, It's just that someone happened to include stuff in meta data. That's the reason why the Google algorithm is so sophisticated.

It needed to do things like just completely disregard meta data for the most part and concentrate on the content of the web page itself in order to try and get you the best results for whatever search query you put in, and other other search engines do similar things using you know, a very uh complex approach to curating data. Uh. So we're still in two thousand three. They also decided

to ship some products. You know, they weren't happy just acquiring companies, so beyond updating their suite of software, Adobe also shipped new stuff like Encore DVD, also a piece of software called Audition one, which was a digital audio editing environment that this was mainly meant for professionals, people who are you that's their living is editing audio, So this wasn't something that the average user would go out and buy necessarily. Um. They also had a product called

Version Q, which was a file management system. Uh and again this doesn't sound particularly sexy or anything, but Version Q what it would allow you to do is track different versions of files so that you could zero in on the specific version you needed to whenever you were

doing publication. This is incredibly important in the publishing world, particularly before there were a lot of collaborative environments available, because you know, typically what would happen is someone would create a file on their machine and then they might copy that file onto a disk or later on a USB drive, or perhaps email it to someone else who would then open it perhaps make some changes. Well, now you've got two versions of that file out there in

the wild. There's the original version that's on the person who created its machine, there's the edited version that's on the other machine that the edited version might get sent to someone else and makes further changes. So you very quickly get into the situation where someone coming from outside may not know which version is the one they need to work with. Yeah, so version Q was kind of a way to help try and keep tabs on what's going on so that confusion would not ruin a project.

And trust me, I've worked on projects that where where we had major setbacks because someone was using an out of date file for part of the project. Um, not a how stuff works. I was gonna say, I'm sorry about that. No, No, it wasn't at how stuff works. It was in my previous life working in other venues that I will not name, but anyway, it is a very frustrating experience. So again, not not something that you know, those of us who are gamers would necessarily think as exciting,

but it's very very important. And you know, Uh, Macromedia around this time has bundled uh it's some of its software together. You know, the freehand um drawing program that's sort of a competitor for Adobe Illustrator and Flash and fireworks, um Dreamweaver. That's uh, every time you say that, the song goes through my head, I'm I'm just imagining Wayne's world. Okay. Anyhow, Um, and so yeah, around this time, back in two thousand three,

Adobe fights back. It bundles together first version of its Creative Suite, Version one point Oh yeah. So this was you know, definitely a way of making a stand and putting together these products that Adobe was known for and pricing them in a way where someone who is really really determined to go into desktop publishing could get all the tools they need in one suite as opposed to

buying it piecemeal. Well yeah, because um, you might prefer one company's tool over another, You might prefer Illustrator over freehand. But then you'd want dream weaver to Uh yeah, I did that on purpose to do your web design and maybe flash and but you needed Photoshop. So and of

course Macromedia and Adobe both knew this. Okay, well, we'll put together a bundle of software that's maybe a little cheaper than if you bought them all together, you know, one by one, and maybe we can lock people into our environment. Gee that that's not anything like the way software companies do that today, not at all. So two thousand four, let's get the acquisitions out of the way. Q Link Business Process Management suffer a company and okay, y z or o kis so the three D technology company.

H we're both acquired by Adobe. Uh. And in two thousand five A Shantanu Narai, and you know I mentioned him earlier, he becomes the president and CEO O of Adobe Systems. And this is also two thou five was a big, big year because that whole macro media company that has been a thorn in adobe side for so long.

They announced Adobe announces a plan to acquire Macromedia and uh and the acquisition is done in an all stock transaction, so instead of cash changing hands, we're talking about stocks, and it was valued at three point four billion with a B dollars. Yes, to to put that in perspective, the revenue for that year was one point nine six billion in for Adobe. So you're talking about, you know, a deal that's uh, it's more than a well nearly

twice the amount of what the revenue was for that year. Yeah. And as you might expect this, Uh, this caused a lot of consternation over whether or not this would be permitted because, um, you know, Adobe and Macromedia had been the two big creative packages that that fought against one another. Again, like I said, they had bundled their software. You were you were an Adobe person or you're a Macromedia person, and uh, well you know that sort of made it

a monopoly in some people's eyes. Uh not so as far as regulators, they decided to go ahead and permit that to happen. Yeah. And uh and this is when Adobe takes stewardship of Flash. Uh, savior of the universe. Now we're now we're we we transferred to queen. Uh. This is we haven't really touched on it here all the we did talk about a bit with XML. Flash was one of those things developed to give more functionality through the web browsing experience than HTML could provide on

its own. Uh. When we did our episode about HTML five, we talked about flash quite a bit. Uh. It was are you are you smiling because you're thinking of the song every time? Okay? So so dreamweaver for me and flash for you? That makes sense? Okay, So anyway, yeah, it's like that. So Flash was a way to have these rich media experiences within a web environment that would not natively be supported by HTML and meant that you had to install this plug in on your browser so

that you could be able to access this content. Otherwise you would just get a little error message saying you could not see whatever it was that was on there. And so um Untobe took ownership of that at this point. So that's kind of why if you've ever if you've always heard of Flash associated with Adobe, that's why it was in two thousand five when they acquired Macromedia. Two

thousand six, they continued acquiring companies. They acquired file Line Digital Rights Management, which was actually a division from uh novice Ware. Digital rights management is one of those terms that is almost like a four letter word in the minds of many people who follow technology. Digital rights management, of course, is all about protecting intellectual property by putting limitations on what people can do with software in an

attempt to prevent piracy. UH. A lot of the complaints around DRM from the consumer side stem from the fact that sometimes these restrictions are they go too far. For instance, having a DRM that requires that you have a persistent connection to the Internet to work on software that is not itself dependent upon Internet connectivity. That would seem prohibitive.

If I'm running a program and all it needs to do is run natively on my machine, I should have an expectation that that machine does not need to be hooked up to the Internet for me to successfully run this software. At least that's that's the general argument. I happen to agree with that argument, but I should say that's just one perspective, and I'm not. I don't mean

to say that's the end all be all. Uh. They also acquired Traded Technologies France TTF, which created software to allow interoperability between CAD systems and multi CAD mock up CAD being computer aided design. Yeah so uh yeah, this is getting a little more specialized. Uh. They also acquired Pixman Tech Technology, which was the digital imaging software company. Also, they acquired Interact, which was a web content management company.

They acquired Serious Magic, which was a video software and communications tool company, and they acquired act Imagine Technology, which was a video and interactive vector graphics company. So lots and lots of acquisitions. In two thousand and six, they also it a huge revenue two point five seven five billion dollars. The previous year was one point nine six,

so that's a pretty impressive growth um. And in two thousand seven, Bruce Chisen resigns as CEO and Shantanu Narayan becomes the new CEO, so he steps up from presidency O t CEO UH. That same year, they shipped the Photoshop light Room software suite, which lets you manage digital

images and post production work. And they also produced sound Booth, which was an audio editing software suite for people who were not audio professionals, So it was a more accessible audio tool suite for people who wanted to produce audio work but didn't have that level of expertise to fiddle with all the knobs on that board that's just outside this room. That intimidates me every time I see it,

because y'all those things move on their own. Well, um yeah, they they Adobe had started really getting into the the casual hobbyist market. I think they realized, Um, well they've

their their software has been pirated quite a bit. UM and they Photoshop in particular, that's probably one of the most pirated pieces of software that I'm aware of, and I think in in some way, uh, they have decided to reach out to the plain old, everyday consumer as a result of this, and as a really good business opportunity anyway, UM, I think it was sort of for for many reasons. But yeah, that that was one of a larger series of of UM efforts in that regard,

like the Element series. UM. Photoshop Elements, for example, is a lower cost version that has, um, you know, a lesser set of tools that the full version of Photoshop has, but it's it's much less expensive too, and it's it's basically aimed at, Hey, I photos of stuff, and I like my kids and my hobbies, and I you know, I like to to shoot photos of of my dog and double rainbow UM and stuff like that, and I just want to I just want to resize that photo.

I want to I want to put it in the school newsletter for my kids, or I want to put up online. And I don't need this crazy resolution to make this this one web page way larger than it needs to be. You know, I don't need to use it and see m y K because it's never gonna see print or if I if it does it, it

doesn't have to be perfect. Well, you know, they'll be said, hey, you know what we can We can offer you tools for this, and they, um, they sort of split a second line off of their their main line of software tools and and started offering those around around this time to too people who um, you know, may just not need the same to the same kinds of professional level tools, and and they were very successful. And this is also the time where I alluded to it in the previous episode.

You know, there was a battle between Apple and Adobe with the whole fonts issue where Apple wanted to try and develop its own fonts, and it actually eventually did because it was licensing fonts from Adobe and felt that those licensing fees were becoming prohibitively expensive, so Apple began to design their own and well, there was another fight

that was gearing up around this time. And it's because in two thousand seven, that's also when we had the introduction of a piece of technology that has revolutionized consumer electronics in the latter half of the first decade of two thousand that was that was a complicated sentence thank you, That would be the iPhone. So the iPhone comes out. It is the first truly successful consumer smartphone in the United States. There were other smartphones that were popular in

other parts of the world. There were some smartphones that had fans in the US, but they just it just was, you know, they were in minority. Most people were using what we call feature phones now cell phones that had some limited web connectivity. I guess they didn't link dumb phones. I was really working on that. Yeah, Well, the iPhone ended up being the first true runaway success smartphone in

the United States. And Steve jobs Uh famously said that he didn't believe that the iPhone or the iOS operating system, which at the time was not called iOS but that's what we call now, um that it would not support flash because they decided that it they wouldn't make it happen. Well, the essentially what the arguments against it at the time, and you could you know, you could maybe uh dispute

the truth behind it. But the arguments were that flash would require so much processing power that it would drain the battery life of an iPhone and create an unsatisfactory experience for the consumer. So you go out, you buy an iPhone, You're like, this is awesome. I'm going to serve the web and oh, this is great. I'm looking all these pages and two hours later like, wait a minute, I have to charge this thing again. Um and Steve Jobs said that's not a good experience. I don't want

that to happen on our product. I'm not going to allow it to happen because I'm not gonna have Flash work on this this device. It created a lot of challenges for developers for all sorts of things, what web apps as well as iPhone apps, things like that. Um and it was kind of a glove in the face of Adobe saying, look, we're creating a juggernaut here. This is going to be the future of computing, whether you like it or not. And we are not supporting this

product that you have taken ownership of. And um and it just got uglier from there. I mean, every people started taking sides designers. A lot of designers love Flash because I mean they can really show what they can do with the with the animation and and you know graphics. It's it can make beautiful web applications and hey, you know we've touched on it in the past. To h the web wasn't designed to do what we do with

it these days. And Johns's argument was that it would be better to support the development of HTML five, which the next generation of the hypertext markup language that would uh natively support things like video and audio uh in ways that HTML the previous versions of HTML did not.

So that was his argument was like, instead of just continuously adding on additional elements to our web browsing experience, let's redefined, redefined the markup language itself so that we don't need all these added elements that are just making this clunkier and it's requiring more processing power. Now, this is Steve Jobs argument, I should I should point out not my own, because I'm an Android phone owner and

my Android phone runs a version of Flash. Um, but that was that was the gauntlet there, and uh as the years go on, it got pretty I mean it got pretty nasty, to the point where I'm going to jump ahead a little bit, but in two thousand and eleven, Adobe announced they would stop developing flash for mobile after version eleven point one and instead they would focus on HTML five. They essentially acquiesced and said, you know, we're getting enough pressure here, We're going to stop pushing flash

for mobile devices. Um and that was you know, that was kind of big news. Well, you know, there were there was a group of people that was sort of in the middle, and I admit I sort of belonged to that group where I could see why Adobe would defend Flash. I mean, you know, it's a flash cow, I mean cash cow sort of in a way. I mean, you know, it's a it's a good technology and in some respects and it there really wasn't There's not anything

i mean, other than than Microsoft silver Light. There's nothing that I can think of right off the top of my head that's um as as mature as a competitor for flash and and like a software that you can go build something in and make a website that has interactive content like that. UM So you know, they would, of course they would defend it. But at the same time, I thought, this is Adobe, they should be able to come up with some killer HTML five editor and then

that's really what they did. They introduced their edge UM software, which is is uh still you know, sort of brand new ish. Uh still very newish, let's say that UM. And you know, they're these tools are designed to work with HTML five and and other related technologies using UH

standards like CSS UM and UH web fonts. You're starting to become more popular too now that you can have fonts load in the cloud rather than having to have them on the host's computer to show up UM, which is the way it was strictly or you know that's uh. These are innovations that they can take advantage of. And you know, I can't think of anybody who does that that kind of thing quite as well as Adobe. And that's my personal opinion. Should probably kind of wrapped this

up before I finished. I should say. They also acquired Business Catalyst, Omnature and Efficient Frontier. Yeah, well they have. They've been moving into marketing as well web marketing. UM. So it uh, you know, unlike some of the other companies that that we've talked about, UM, Adobe has has faced stiff competition from from a couple of its uh

serious serious competitors. I mean, they're still face facing h Apple and and Avid and some of the others, but they've they've weathered that competition, and uh, you know, there hasn't been a lot of uh confusion and drama at the top. And there haven't been too many huge like departures from Adobe's core business. Like you don't see examples of something really really unusual wool that has nothing to do with any form of publication or editing, which is

really what Adobe is known for. You haven't really seen anything that goes so far outside of that as to make you say, huh. So yeah, I mean that's that's kind of the story of Adobe so far. And I mean the company is still going strong, and it'll be interesting to see how Adobe, uh you know, how how it adjusts to the HTML five era, which of course, you know, still has not really launched. I mean, there's there's some early development in HTML five, but it's still

not a thing with a capital T yet. Yeah, And I think I think that was one of the reasons why so many developers still cited on the side of Adobe with flash was because flash is mature in HTML five has yet to mature. In fact, there's not a firm um standard yet. And I've got friends who are flash animators, you know. They that's the tool they used to create anime s and uh they have very strong opinions on this subject, understandably so because their livelihood depends

upon this tool. And uh so their opinions are very different from apples. So, I mean it's there. There are a lot of sides to this story. We don't mean to try and oversimplify it and say that one company has the right perspective over another one. Uh. In many ways, you could argue that both perspectives are valid, just for different reasons. So anyway, that's the that's the story of Adobe in two parts. And uh, we're gonna wrap it

up here. If you guys have any suggestions for topics that we should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, I invite you to send us a little note letting us know of your your brilliant idea. UM, you can learn that note to our email address it's tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter or handle of both of those is tech Stuff, hs W and Chris and I

will talk to you again really soon. For more on this, and of thons of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.