Founders at Work.pdf

292 Founders at Work
announced that he was going with TrueType for Windows and that he had
acquired a clone implementation of PostScript, which he would license to
Apple so Apple would no longer have to pay royalties to Adobe. On the platform
that morning were Gates, Steve Jobs talking about NeXT, and John
Warnock (he and I used to alternate and he was the lucky guy who was on stage
that year).
This quote has been repeated a lot because John spoke after Gates, and
Gates had talked about how this was going to improve the world for publishing
and printing—but they couldn’t even demo the technology at the time. John got
up and he said, “I’ve never heard so much garbage mumbo jumbo in all my
life.” And then he proceeded to talk about Adobe Type Manager (ATM) and
what we were going to do. Once we learned the Apple-Microsoft alliance was
going to happen, we decided that our only response would be to get to market
immediately and to make ATM available on both the Apple and Microsoft platforms
as an aftermarket product very inexpensively. I no longer remember the
price, but it may have been $99, which at the time was considered very lowpriced
for software.
We sold hundreds of thousands of units in the first year, and it took Apple
and Microsoft 3 years before they ever actually shipped a product. By then it
was a moot point. During that time, Apple decided that they couldn’t build a
product using a clone implementation, so they came back and redid the
PostScript deal with us.
The thing that was really most important, as a startup—though by then we
weren’t really a startup—by then we were public, but a young company—is the
relationship that we had built with our customers. We wanted them to feel that
a) they were given a decent deal and that b) they trusted us to lead them to
where they needed to go. So at that same conference, the organizers decided
very quickly to put an extra panel on the last day and have a live debate over
whether the attendees—and this was all the major players in printing and
publishing—preferred to have Apple and Microsoft take over their future or
whether they wanted to stay with Adobe. Before the panel started, the moderator
got up and said, “I’d like to get a feeling for what the sense of the group is
before we start this. I’d like everyone who wants Apple and Microsoft to succeed
in putting Adobe out of business to raise their hands.” There were a few
Apple and Microsoft employees in the audience, but out of about 1,500 people,
only a couple dozen hands were raised.
So that reinforced a message that John and I had always preached inside the
company about how to treat our customers. Listen to them very carefully.
Understand what their requirements are and what their needs are. Not necessarily
do what they asked us to do, but to have the vision to do more than they
expected. We had worked religiously at that. We had indoctrinated in all of our
employees that you treat a customer the way you’d like to be treated. That you
are responsible for that customer’s success and, if you fail at your job, you may
cause their business to fail. I think sometimes the cynics would look at that and
say, “That’s sort of goody-two-shoes. Maybe this guy’s reading too much of the
Bible or something.” But it’s just good business. And that event demonstrated