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October 22, 2006
Defining the future
Defining the future: Ryan Blitstein of Mercury News interviews John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe founders. I particularly liked this part: "(Q) It's been said that many of the technologies Adobe develops don't have an obvious use. How do you monetize them into a business? (A) Almost every single one of our major products was like that. PostScript had no market. They said there was no market for personal computers driving that kind of publishing. When Illustrator came out there was not one single graphic artist in the world that used a personal computer to do any of their work. Not one. When Photoshop came out the largest hard drive you could buy was 20 megabytes. That's one bad photograph." Reminds me of the early reaction to RIAs, 4.5 years ago... it takes awhile to lay the groundwork, but helpful stuff eventually wins out. (Parallel backgrounder on early Adobe here.)
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 22, 2006 6:41 AM