Adobe’s first product, Postscript®, was a driving force behind the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-1980s. Postscript provided an interface between a computer program and an output device such as a printer. It comprised of three parts; a page description language that was open, documented, and free, an interpreter which was licensed to output device manufacturers, and fonts that were sold to end customers such as graphic artists.
The first postscript products were introduced in 1985 through a strategic alliance among four firms: Adobe, Apple, Aldus, and Linotype. The combination of products from these firms sparked the desktop users could create newsletters and other documents that had a professional look and feel: documents could integrate graphics and text using professional quality fonts.
The result was accomplished through a system of products. Aldus PageMaker software, which ran on Apple Macintosh, enabled the creation of documents that integrated text and graphics, PageMaker required a postscript device for printing. The Apple Laser writer was the first postscript printer and incorporated a postscript interpreter licensed from Adobe. Finally, professional-looking documents only required high-quality fonts such as Times Roman or Palatino, which typically were only available to professional publishers. Linotype, a firm with over 100 years of experience in the typesetter industry, licensed a set of its most popular fonts to Adobe so that Adobe could offer them in postscript format. The Laser Writer came with 35 postscript fonts build in Linotype also introduced a high-end postscript image setter so that PageMaker documents could be used in professional publishing.
By 1989, Postscript had become the defacto standard for printing in the graphic arts and publishing industries. A most 100% of the high-end image-setters on the market incorporated postscript, while penetration in the general laser printer market reached only about 25%, penetration of Postscript in laser printers used by graphic artists was closer to 100%. Adobe also leveraged the underlying graphics technology of postscripts in applications software for the graphic arts community. The first end-user application, Adobe Illustrator, was introduced in March 1987 and gained wide acceptance among graphic artists. Illustrator created output Postscript output and helped to create demand for Postscript printers. Adobe also acquired a number of software products including Photoshop for digital image editing in 1989, and Aldus PageMaker in 1993. These products were extremely successful, with Photostop capturing over 90% of the market for photo-editing software.
Ownership and leveraging of the Postscript standard had reaped huge rewards for Adobe; between 1984 and 1995, revenue had grown from $2.2 million to $762 million- a compound annual growth; rate of 70%. Adobe’s share price growth had been equally impressive, increasing at an average rate of 29% between 1986, when the firm went public, and 1995.
In order to create PDF documents, users had to purchase either Acrobat ® Exchange for $195, or a more sophisticated product, Acrobat ® Distiller for $695. As with the Postscript standard, the specification for PDF was open. By using documentation from Adobe, other firms could create files in PDF format. Sales of Acrobat however were originally quite disappointing and reached only about $25 million in 1993. Given the advent of the internet, Adobe modified its Acrobat strategy. Instead of focusing exclusively on document exchange among workers within a corporation, Adobe also targeted internet users. The goal was to make PDF the de facto standard for posting and exchanging documents on the internet.