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. It
had always been our strategy to be platform-neutral.
It came to a head at the Seybold Conference in San Francisco in September
of 1989. Microsoft told us they weren’t going to license our technology and, in
fact, that they were going to form an alliance with Apple. So our biggest customer
and our biggest competitor got together on the stage, and Bill Gates
Charles Geschke 291
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

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