Photoshop and Illustrator: how Adobe ‘outperformed’ its competition by buying it and eliminating it

Adobe is currently known for Photoshop, Illustrator InDesign After Effects Premiere Audition light room the format PDF and a large number of applications that are part of your subscription service CreativeCloud which is used by millions of professional users in the area of ​​design and desktop publishing.

The software company has a privileged position in this industry, but, for many years, it was just one more among several, recognized more by the binomial Ai/Ps (Illustrator/Photoshop). To speak of its history is to refer to the evolution of the design market itself, an area where innovation was as important as acquisition capacity, as will become apparent in these lines.

If you ever searched to download Photoshop or Illustrator or maybe some desktop publishing tool like InDesign nowadays, you may have done it because you learned how to use it in your school, university, work, etc. even if you have not been linked to the fields of design or photo manipulation afterwards.

Today we will tell you how this empire of applications was formed, and how an entire generation of software and programs dedicated to the desktop publishing revolution remained, almost entirely, in the hands of a single company: Adobe.

We meet in 1979. A group of executives and engineers from Manzana make the legendary visit to the Xerox Research Center in Palo Alto (Xerox PARC). Steve Jobs is part of the group, and he is impressed with three developments that he believed to be revolutionary (and he was right): the graphical user interface —with the mouse—, object-oriented programming, and a system of networked computers.

However, the one that surprised him the most was the first, which complemented very well with another paradigm developed by Xerox: laser printing.

Years later, in 1982, John Warnock and Charles Geschke, members of the Xerox PARC team, left the company to develop and sell the PostScript page description language (heavily based on Interpress, the Xerox laser printer language). Steve Jobs visits both of them again in 1984, asking them to adapt it so that the printers can be controlled. A year later, Apple launches the LaserWriter, which came from the factory with post script. Both products along with Aldus PageMaker software drove the call desktop publishing revolution: computer, diagramming software and a printer.

PostScript became an international standard for printers around the world, containing algorithms that perfectly described the shape of letters in many languages. Adobe was able to license this language to more than 400 software companies and 19 printer manufacturers. After this, they launched their own digital fonts (licensing Linotype’s famous Times Roman) and their own format to distribute them (Type 1).

In 1987, Adobe develops Illustrator for the Apple Macintosh. This program would help popularize PostScript and allow for vector-based graphics. Two years later, Photoshop was released with a first version that didn’t even include such basic features as layers. In 1993, they would launch the PDF format and the program made to view these documents: Adobe Acrobat Reader.

It was at this time that the competition entered a historic stage. Aldus, the original creators of PageMaker, had come up with their own vector graphics program called FreeHand. This application was created by Altsys, which was also active in developing programs for design, drawing, publishing, etc. These are some of the companies that entered to compete with Adobe at that time:

Perhaps the product that generated the most controversy during these years was FreeHand. This program was originally released in 1988, along with PageMaker. Aldus licensed the program from altsys who developed it under the name of Virtuoso.

In 1994, Aldus it was acquired by Adobe, so FreeHand became part of it; however, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) determined that FreeHand and Illustrator were direct competitors, and that the fact that they are owned by a single company (Adobe) could constitute a monopolistic practice.

Since FreeHand had been developed by Altsys, the FTC ordered that ownership be returned to Altsys. A year after this, Macromedia, the company behind web content technologies like Shockwave and Flash (which it had only acquired a year earlier), became interested in competing with Adobe and acquired Altsys, and with it, FreeHand.

In the second half of the 1990s, FreeHand maintained its popularity against Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Macromedia continued to develop other products such as Fireworks and Dreamweaver; however, by the early 21st century, their interest in FreeHand had waned and it was no longer as consistently updated.

It was in 2005, after years of fierce competition, that Adobe was finally able to acquire macro media with its entire product portfolio, including FreeHand. Since the FTC had prohibited a single company from owning this and illustrator Adobe’s decision was to discontinue the product immediately. He thus killed his greatest competition, which was now only reduced to CorelDraw.

For its part, Photoshop Having not faced too many challenges from other similar products, it was able to sustain its evolution on the innovations of the companies that Adobe continued to acquire. Following the purchase of Aldus in 1994, the Aldus Gallery Effects filter pack (sold as a separate product) was included in the ‘filters’ tab of Photoshop.

Likewise, and with the purchase of Macromedia, Adobe was able to form that empire of applications that we know today and that continues to position itself in the desktop publishing market. Following the rise of web 2.0 and social media, Photoshop and Illustrator became part of Adobe’s Creative Suite, and later Creative Cloud. That was when they finally established themselves as a standard, while all their competition was practically eliminated or acquired.

Source-larepublica.pe