Unkillable Monster

founder John Warnock on the Competitive Advantages of Aesthetics and the

John Warnock sense of aesthetics his love of visual design and fine typography is evident as soon you step inside his home. In the entryway is an elegant stone carving of the Latin alphabet. A page from an illuminated manuscript is displayed in the corner of the living room. That sense of aesthetics, combined with a strong belief doing things right technically, has driven Adobe Systems the company Warnock founded with Charles Geshcke throughout much of its history.

This passion convinced Warnock to focus on the company Acrobat product line even though the market initially showed little interest and Adobe own board of directors sought to kill the product. Warnock instincts proved accurate in this instance. After years of floundering, Acrobat later grew to become one of Adobe most profitable products.

Yet that vision of what is technically and aesthetically has also blinded the company to some of the major shifts in technology. During the rise of the web, Adobe sat on the sidelines longer than most companies partly because, as Warnock characterizes it, versions of HTML from a design point of view were awful.

Given these steadfast views, it is perhaps surprising that much of Adobe competitive strategy has long depended on a delicate balance between publicly documenting its intellectual property and gaining a competitive advantage through proprietary software. This approach has led the company to establish several of the key standards for print and interactive publishing: the PostScript printer language, Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF), and the Flash format the company gained from its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005. Adobe has generated significant revenue by selling software tools to create and modify these openly published file formats. An edited version of that conversation follows. My wife and I decided we didn want to do that. I had a friend, William Newman, at Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center]. He [asked around] and Chuck name came up as starting a new endeavor at the PARC. So, Chuck and I met on a [job] interview.

He was about to start a lab called the Imaging Sciences Laboratory. They built the first version of a personal computer in the [Xerox] Alto and had the beginnings of graphic user interfaces. They were going to the next generation machine and all of the stuff they had done was very machine specific. I was chartered with building the device independent data representation for dealing with graphics. They had started using laser printers and [Xerox printing protocols were not terribly flexible they had very, very specific bitmaps [fixed resolution images] that they used for fonts. They were okay for producing letters and reports, but they could not deal with sophisticated graphics.

At Evans Sutherland John Gaffney and I developed a language called the Design System that ran on [Digital Equipment Corp.] PDP 11s. It was an interpretive language and had the same syntax and structure that PostScript ended up having. I decided that I needed an interactive interpretive tool bench at PARC to do my experiments. So I re implemented the Design System with Martin Newell. We added all the graphic operators so we could do graphics and test out ideas on screens and different medium. We called it JaM for and Martin. was then starting development with the Star [computer workstation] and they needed a printer protocol. I proposed using JaM as a framework for a printer protocol. We got five designers into the process: Butler Lampson, Bob Sproull, Jerry Mendelson, Chuck and myself. Over a two year period we designed [the Xerox printer protocol] InterPress. They said, we love it. We make it a standard. We are going to put the locks on it and wait until all of our printers can do this before we release it. Chuck and I found this totally unacceptable [and realized,] will never happen in our lifetime. only way to make standards is to get them out and just compete. I went into Chuck office one day and said, we [can stay at] a very cushy, wonderful job here. Or we could try to get something done. Why don I get on an airplane, go talk to Dave Evans, my old thesis adviser, and get some advice from him. [Evans] introduced us to [investment banker] Bill Hambrecht who said, let go for it. founded Adobe on December 2, [1982] years ago. Was that a practical need because you needed software to support your printer? Or was it a strategic business decision?

Warnock: We felt that if we wanted this broadly adopted that we had to do exactly the opposite of what Xerox wanted to do. We had to publish it. We had to make it very, very open because the trick was to get both [software] application developers and operating system developers to support it. Without documentation that was never going to happen. There was one aspect of it that wasn so open: PostScript 1 font format was initially a proprietary secret.

The first was [that] this was the first time a full programming language had been [used] to control a printer. There was a very strategic reason to do that. Most [software] application programs have their own model of how they work, and typically it not the way that the printer wants to work. This was true with Apple. Apple had [the Macintosh graphics system] QuickDraw, and they had their own model for how QuickDraw worked.

The strategy was to write a program that would interpret QuickDraw but load the program into the printer as a PostScript program and let the printer do the work of transforming [the QuickDraw graphics] into the image. That way, all the QuickDraw applications could work out of the gate. The same was true with some of the early word processors.

The second [technological development] was the font problem.

The highest resolution printers at that time were 300 spots to the inch. If you represented characters as outlines the obvious [way], the fonts looked terrible. The sampling artifacts [the side effects of digitization] were horrendous. We knew that no publication or office environment would live with that.

We had to solve the font problem. [Stanford University computer scientist] Don Knuth worked on it for years and years and years, trying to get good looking fonts for TeX [digital typesetting software] and he never succeeded.

I had a sort of backward idea of how to do it. If you put down the outline of the character [on a low resolution device] the rasters [the lines the device is able to render] don line up you will get some staffs that are 2 pixels wide and some that are 3. It makes the fonts look horrible.

The very simple idea is: Rather than figuring out what dots to turn on, you stretch the characters so that they line up with the rasters. So if you had the left side of the [letter] and the right side of the all you have to do is make sure that they are in phase with the frequency of the rasters and then cache that character. That guarantees that all the staffs are uniform thickness and all the x heights hit at the right place. It turned awful looking fonts into incredible looking fonts.

We never published it because it is such a simple idea that if you applied for a patent, everyone could figure a workaround.Articles Connexes：