Founders at Work.pdf

Charles Geschke 291
We also had to fight the antibodies inside the company. When we introduced
Illustrator, we realized that the profit margins were going to be very different
because we had to actually package the software, distribute it physically,
build business relationships with a different sales channel—because when we
sold PostScript, we sold directly to the major OEMs, so we literally only had
tens of customers for PostScript. Now we had to get thousands and eventually
millions. Very different business proposition, very different market, different
sales channel. So there were a lot of people inside the company who said, “This
is crazy. We’re going to invest all this money in this? What if it doesn’t work?
We’re going to lose our profitability.”
John and I were convinced early on not only that you couldn’t restrict yourself
to a single product, but you couldn’t restrict yourself to a single sales channel
to get your product to market either. Business relationships can eventually
decay or fall apart and then you’re stuck. You have no way to get your products
out and no way to respond to the market.
Livingston: Did Adobe have any major relationships decay?
Geschke: Of course. The most famous one was in the fall of 1989. We had been
working on technology to make high-quality text on the display, not just the
printed page. Up until that time, all text on computer displays were bitmaps
that were handcrafted. We wanted to be able to demonstrate that you could use
the same technology on the screen that you used on the printed page.
Apple had actually been working on that for a while. Their technology was
called TrueType. We were trying to market our solution to Apple, not with a lot
of success. By then Steve Jobs had left. He’d been the primary Adobe champion
inside Apple. Now Jean-Louis Gassée had taken over the product side of
the business, and for whatever reason, Jean-Louis and Adobe never got along.
So we were beginning to really have a problem with Apple. They were getting
tired of paying us royalties for the LaserWriter; they thought that they shouldn’t
have to pay anymore.
We decided that one way to deal with that would be to convince Microsoft
that they should adopt our technology for Windows. In fact, we were able to get
one of their biggest customers at the time, IBM, to agree to adopt our technology
on both OS/2 and on their versions of Windows. But when we tried to sell it
to Microsoft, we just couldn’t come to a business deal. The thing that was frustrating
is that it was already proven technology. We could demo it. And we
already had all typeface licenses set up with the major vendors, so you knew
that you would have that requirement satisfied, and, more importantly, we
weren’t going to charge. We were trying to give our customers the same feeling
on both Macintosh and Windows machines, so we wouldn’t be forcing them to
make a decision about whose products to buy in order to use our technology. It
had always been our strategy to be platform-neutral.
It came to a head at the Seybold Conference in San Francisco in September
of 1989. Microsoft told us they weren’t going to license our technology and, in
fact, that they were going to form an alliance with Apple. So our biggest customer
and our biggest competitor got together on the stage, and Bill Gates