Steve Jobs Set Adobe on the Path to Acquiring Flash

Steve Jobs set Adobe on a path away from hardware and towards software which eventually led to their purchase of Flash, notes TNW.

Revealed in the book, "Inside the Publishing Revolution" by Pamela Pfiffner, is an interesting story about the early days of both Apple and Adobe.

When Adobe launched in 1982 it was a hardware company with two employees, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. The two men were trying to build the best printer ever based on the fantastic PostScript software Warnock had written. At the time Apple was also working on a laser printer based on hardware from Canon but did not have the software to run it.


After Steve Jobs heard about Adobe's printer he went to take a look and was blown away by their software. "We were the first ones in the U.S. to have the Canon laser printer," said Jobs. "When we went over to see John and Chuck, we could quickly see that our hardware was going to be better than theirs and that their software was more advanced than what we were working on. I was simply blown away by what I saw."

In 1984, Jobs had a meeting with Warnock and Geschke that changed the company and publishing forever.

Over breakfast at a Cupertino health food restaurant, he proposed that Adobe license its technology to Apple for inclusion in a 300-dpi Canon-equipped laser printer driven by the Macintosh. According to Geschke, Jobs told them: "I don't need the computer. I don't need the printer. I need the software."

This time the duo took notice. "If someone keeps saying, 'You have a business here,' and it's not the business you're doing, then it's time to change your business," Geschke says now. Jobs says, simply, "I convinced them to drop plans to be a hardware company and be a software company instead."


Jobs managed to get what he wanted which led Adobe to pursue software like PostScript, Photoshop and eventually, through an acquisition of Macromedia, Flash.

Hit the link below to read a more detailed account.

Read More