Adobe – History, Brand Value and Strategies

Adobe company elongated as Adobe Incorporated Company. It was known as Adobe Systems Incorporated until the 3rd of October, 2018.

It is an American company which is headquartered in San Jose, California. It is an MNC working on creating multimedia and other software products specializing in the creativity sect. They later suddenly jumped into software used for digital marketing. 

The founding fathers were Charles Geschke and John Warnock. They started it after leaving the research and development company called Xerox PARC. The CEO of the company is Shantanu Narayen. 

Adobe History

The company was named after a creek in California named Adobe, and it was started in the garage of the house of one of the founding fathers, John Warnock, in 1982. The logo was designed by Marva Warnock, wife of John Warnock. 

It was one of the first companies that grabbed Apple’s attention, and even Apple wanted to buy it but ended up with 19% shares in the company. After digging into various business ideas, the founders landed on Adobe PostScript page description language. 

  • The First Such Application, Introduced in 1987, Was Adobe Illustrator.

The initial days

It included the use of algorithms and thus was a highly accepted form. PostScript emerged as a trending and standard language across more than 401 third-party software programs and for around 20 printer companies by 1987. 

Due to its flexibility to even add graphics, it was one of the highly used printer languages. They launched Illustrator, which was the vector- based drawing software. With Adobe entering NASDAQ, the company has grown multi-fold within four years. 

Then they introduced Photoshop in 1989, which took over the market in no time.

The rise of Adobe 

After four years, they introduced PDF and the software Adobe Acrobat and Reader, which became a standard internationally. 

Then 2008 and 2009 resulted in several laid-offs, and then 2010 was also a difficult year. Apple had decided to discontinue using Flash, which was marked unsafe and unreliable.

Then again, a setback hit the company, and they discontinued the usage of Flash and shifted their focus on HTML5, and then 2013 also was a difficult year for the company. 

Adobe Brand values

According to the statistics, Adobe has around 22000 employees, out of which about 40% work in the origin city, San Jose. The revenue generated was $ 11.17 billion in the year 2019. 

An American MNC magazine named Fortune marked Adobe as an outstanding place to work from 1995 till 2013. 

It was further ranked with the title of the best U.S company to work for in so many years, and the rank varied from 5th to 83rd. It had its charm not just in the U.S but in Canada too, with the Top 100 Employers in the year 2008.

Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Adobe five stars for privacy.

  • The Digital Strategy Group Defines Adobe’s Perspective on Each Industry and Advises Our Customers on Digital Innovation.

Adobe Brand strategies

Product range

The digital product ranges from products like Photoshop, which was an image editing software, Acrobat Reader, which gives the PDF (Portable Document Format), Adobe Flash web software, Adobe Creative Suite, which was substituted by Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Illustrator, which was the vector graphics editor, etc.

They launched a printer language which was PostScript. Then, they launched a digital font like Type 1, which was patented, and Bill Paxton worked on it.

They released a video editing software called Adobe Premiere in 1999, later relaunched as Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003. 

Research and development

It had many development centers worldwide, like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Massachusetts, and Utah. In India, there are two development centers in Bangalore and Noida. 

Standards in a row

With a variety of software, Adobe created a gallery of products on its display which became international standards as they were launched. PDF is an example of a standard accepted internationally. 

Acquiring companies and software

In 1992, OCR systems, Inc. was bought by the company. In 1994, Adobe went on to buy Aldus, due to which it had taken control of two software, After Effects and PageMaker. And then they took over the TIFF format also. It didn’t end there. The company undertook two more companies, LaserTools Corporation and Computation Incorporated. 

Then in 1995, FrameMaker was added to the line of software which was the product of Frame Technology Corporation and was a document processor. 

And then it took two more companies, Ares Software corporation in 1996 and Accelio in 2002.

Adobe acquired Cool Edit Pro, an audio editing and multitrack recording software named Adobe Audition. 

In 2005, Adobe undertook another company which was a competitor in the market and launched so many software in a line. 

Then in 2008, Adobe launched Adobe Media Player, removed the GoLive software, and started with Dreamweaver. Later the same year, it released Acrobat.com, which consisted of web applications offering a collaborative platform. Creative Suite 4 came out with six different configurations, ranging from $1700 to $2600.

Later in 2010, the company acquired Day Software and launched other software after difficulties. 

In 2011, the company bought DemDex Incorporated company and later came up with a new application, Carousel and later the name was changed to Adobe Revel. It went on to undertake Nitobi Software and Efficient Frontier.

The company went on to acquire Marketo, which was an automation software company in 2018 and then Allegorithm, which was a 3D texturing company in 2019.

Future strategies

In 2020, a summit was scheduled to be held this year, but due to Corona, the company has decided to conduct it online. Looking at the expansion of the company and growth curve, the revenue generated will increase in the coming years. The trouble going on with the pricing issue will be resolved in the coming years. 

Raising security concerns is also an important issue that has been brought to light which the company is trying to resolve. 

They have been planning to work more on the side of security because hackers have been stealing data which has been harming the users. 

They have been keeping a keen eye on the market and keeping up with the range of products, which is the core competency of Adobe. Due to this, there has been around 20% of growth every year. 

They have been looking forward to developing the digital business as much as possible. They want to work on the creativity front. 

They want to run a digital business and interact more with their users with the digital tools in this digital era. They are shifting their focus to the young audience who can truly understand to the core.

Conclusion

With digital tools as the weapon, Adobe aims at the users to expand in the market. The offline to online process is difficult, but once a user takes the leap of faith, Adobe is there to help the user guide in the online field and provide a varied range of products. 

The products are handy and thus are helping Adobe to grow. It has gradually created dominance in the domain. But with great power comes greater responsibilities which they have to focus on. The security and safety issue of the user is one such issue that Adobe has to pay a lot of attention to now, as due to these reasons, it can lose its users in the long run. 

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