Founders at Work.pdf

Charles Geschke 289
mathematics of a shape and how to get that into raster data that would drive a
bitmap printer or a bitmap display.
It was a combination of all those skills and backgrounds that he and I had
that put us in a unique position. And then the good fortune to get a business
deal with two or three very important customers early on.
Livingston: Did your work at PARC on the programming language Mesa give
you any critical insights that helped you make PostScript better?
Geschke: Not directly. Mesa was very focused on conventional programming,
the kind that was done to build operating systems. It had one characteristic that
conceptually is similar to PostScript, in that in both Mesa and PostScript, we
had the idea that you didn’t have to program at the level of the machine. In
PostScript, you can program at a higher level, in a language that is more in tune
with what you wanted to print as opposed to how it printed. In Mesa, we actually
developed both a programming language for programmers to organize
large, complex programs and a machine that would take the output of that language
and operate on it very efficiently. That was built into the Star workstation
that Xerox introduced in 1981.
Livingston: What were some other major turning points?
Geschke: Well, certainly if you remember back to that time in the office printing
market, HP was in a very strong leadership position with the LaserJet.
When we found out from HP that they wanted to come back and talk to us, that
was a very important moment because we were, in fact, able to sign an agreement
with HP and have them adopt PostScript on their LaserJet printers. That
was a big coup for us as a company. It was at the same time that we managed to
sign up IBM. So our strategy of not going to IBM early had paid off. Once they
saw the market mushrooming for Apple, both IBM and HP decided they had to
pay attention to it and that’s how we got those business deals.
The other lesson that we had to learn, though, is that you can’t be a oneproduct
company. There’s a very high risk when you’re a single-product company
that eventually a combination of changes in the technological landscape
and changes in the competitive landscape will eventually cause you to begin
losing market share. And once you lose market share, then your revenue and
earnings begin to fall. Fortunately, we had decided that in order to be able to
really demonstrate the capability that was inside the LaserWriter, we couldn’t
rely on the standard business applications—and even the graphics applications—that
were out there. If you remember, Apple had a product called
MacDraw, and they had another product called MacPaint. They were organized
around the concept that you were going to be doing your printing on an
ImageWriter; they didn’t have the characteristics that could really show off the
fact that the LaserWriter was in fact a full printing press. On the LaserWriter,
you could combine graphics and images and text in innovative ways that none of
the application packages were enabling. More importantly, designers knew they
wanted to be more creative but had no tools to enable their creative expression.