that Xerox introduced in 1981.
Livingston: What were some other major turning points?
Geschke: Well, certainly if you remember back to that time in the office printing
market, HP was in a very strong leadership position with the LaserJet.
When we found out from HP that they wanted to come back and talk to us, that
was a very important moment because we were, in fact, able to sign an agreement
with HP and have them adopt PostScript on their LaserJet printers. That
was a big coup for us as a company. It...

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...

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.
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...

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....

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...