that Xerox introduced...
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 was at the same time that we managed to
sign up IBM. So our strategy of not going to IBM early had paid off. Once they
saw the market mushrooming for Apple, both IBM and HP decided they had to
pay attention to it and that’s how we got those business deals.
The other lesson that we had to learn, though, is that you can’t be a oneproduct
company. There’s a very high risk when you’re a single-product company
that eventually a combination of changes in the technological landscape
and changes in the competitive landscape will eventually cause you to begin
losing market share. And once you lose market share, then your revenue and
earnings begin to fall. Fortunately, we had decided that in order to be able to
really demonstrate the capability that was inside the LaserWriter, we couldn’t
rely on the standard business applications—and even the graphics applications—
that were out there. If you remember, Apple had a product called
MacDraw, and they had another product called MacPaint. They were organized
around the concept that you were going to be doing your printing on an
ImageWriter; they didn’t have the characteristics that could really show off the
fact that the LaserWriter was in fact a full printing press. On the LaserWriter,
you could combine graphics and images and text in innovative ways that none of
the application packages were enabling. More importantly, designers knew they
wanted to be more creative but had no tools to enable their creative expression.
Charles Geschke 289
But there was also another reason for developing Illustrator. John’s wife was
a graphic designer, and once we brought out the LaserWriter, she wanted to get
some of her design concepts out on that machine. So John was programming in
PostScript by hand to get this output to come out and he said, “This is stupid. I
need to build a tool that behaves more like what a graphic artist would expect to
have in terms of pen and ink and drawing and so forth, and then let the tool
write the PostScript code.” So that’s where Illustrator came from.
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