Founders at Work.pdf

290 Founders at Work
But there was also another reason for developing Illustrator. John’s wife was
a graphic designer, and once we brought out the LaserWriter, she wanted to get
some of her design concepts out on that machine. So John was programming in
PostScript by hand to get this output to come out and he said, “This is stupid. I
need to build a tool that behaves more like what a graphic artist would expect to
have in terms of pen and ink and drawing and so forth, and then let the tool
write the PostScript code.” So that’s where Illustrator came from.
It was introduced in the winter of 1987. We also had been working with
scanning equipment and photographs. Scanners were still very expensive at
that time and so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity in the area of photography yet,
but we instinctively knew it was going to come.
We were introduced to two brothers from Michigan: Tom and John Knoll.
They had built a package that would let you work with a photographic image
and change it, modify it, enhance it, do a variety of things. But of course it was
doing that on a Macintosh with 512K of RAM, a little black-and-white monitor
screen, no color, a disk drive that maybe held 10 or 20 megs. There were no digital
cameras and scanners cost $20,000. But the software looked really good. We
thought that this had to be a great idea eventually and it was the missing component.
There were applications that produced text. We had Illustrator, an
application that could produce line art and drawings. But we didn’t have
an application that could deal with photographs, even though the printer could
print them. So we began investing in Photoshop, and we paid a lot of attention
to the Japanese who were beginning to work on digital cameras and lower-cost
scanners. We introduced Photoshop probably 2 or 3 years before the market
was ready for it.
I am not a hunter, never have fired a gun, but I’m told that if you want to
shoot a duck, you have to shoot where the duck is going to be, not where the
duck is. It’s the same with introducing technology: if you’re only focused on the
market today, by the time you introduce your solution to that problem, there’ll
probably be several others already entrenched. It will be hard to dislodge them,
and hard to convince people that what you have is so much better that they
should make a change. Much better to figure out where the marketplace is
going to be in a few years, focus on providing a solution to that, and let the market
forces catch up to you. That’s what we did with Photoshop and it turned out
to have been a great decision for us, and good for the Knoll brothers. It paid a
lot of royalties for their work and developed a whole industry around digital
cameras and digital photography.
Livingston: If you were coming out a little before the market was ready for
your products, did you ever have people just not understand how great the
products were?
Geschke: In those early renditions of the product, we would focus on a select
community of people who understood both technology and the potential. So we
would market primarily through technical analysts and product research kinds
of people, and not attempt to go to a mass market, because there was no mass
market.