Adobe
Adobe Inc. is an American multinational computer software company. Incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California, it has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures and print. The company has expanded into digital marketing management software. Adobe has millions of users worldwide. Flagship products include: Photoshop image editing software, Adobe Illustrator vector-based illustration software, Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Portable Document Format (PDF), plus a host of tools primarily for audio-visual content creation, editing and publishing. The company began by leading in the desktop publishing revolution of the mid-eighties, went on to lead in animation and multi-media through its acquisition of Macromedia, from which it acquired animation technology Adobe Flash, Developed inDesign and subsequently gained a leadership position in publishing over Quark and PageMaker, developed video editing and compositing technology in Premiere, pioneered low-code web development with Muse, and emerged with a suite of solutions for marketing management. Adobe offered a bundled solution of its products named Adobe Creative Suite, which evolved into a SaaS subscription offering Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution.
As of 2019, Adobe has more than 21,000 employees worldwide, about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in the United States in Newton, New York City, Minneapolis, Lehi, Seattle, Austin and San Francisco. It also has major development operations in Noida and Bangalore in India.
The company was started in John Warnock's garage. The name of the company, Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, which ran behind Warnock's house. Steve Jobs attempted to buy the company for $5 million in 1982, but Warnock and Geschke refused. Their investors urged them to work something out with Jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company. Warnock and Geschke considered various business options including a copy-service business and a turnkey system for office printing. Then they chose to focus on developing specialized printing software and created the Adobe PostScript page description language.
PostScript was the first truly international standard for computer printing as it included algorithms describing the letter-forms of many languages.
On November 9, 2020, Adobe announced it will spend US$1.5 billion to acquire Workfront, a provider of marketing collaboration software. The acqusition was completed in early December 2020.
Adobe's biggest acquisition was announced in 2022, where it announced that it had agreed to buy Figma, an Adobe XD competitor, for $20 billion, along with 15 months of regulatory scrutiny from the US and European Union.
On June 17, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Adobe for its subscription business model practice, citing hidden termination fees and the company pushing customers towards more expensive plans.
In June 2024, after facing backlash for its changes to the terms of service, Adobe updated them to explicitly pledge it won't use customer data to train its AI models.