Apple and Adobe are an old couple, going all the way back to the early Mac days. Adobe had created beautiful fonts, a PostScript interpreter, and had absorbed Aldus for its seminal program, PageMaker. That’s how the LaserWriter was born and the era of desktop publishing began. Besides being crucial to the Macintosh by creating so much desktop publishing software, Adobe also acquired and published Photoshop in 1990, at first exclusively on the Macintosh.
One is tempted to say that without Adobe there would be no Macintosh and no Apple. Steve Jobs and John Warnock, one of Adobe’s founders, were close, even if things didn’t always go swimmingly. An Apple engineer, Gifford Calenda, began to develop TrueType, an alternative to Adobe’s “mathematical” fonts. I was at Apple when we had to make the buy-or-create decision. The basic set of Adobe fonts cost about $30, if memory serves. If Gifford and his colleagues succeeded, which they eventually did, we could get our fonts for “free”. To make sure the fonts got industry-wide adoption, Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft for free. The business model wasn’t font revenue but Adobe license fee avoidance. Adobe, understandably, wasn’t too pleased with this.
Sometime during the mid-nineties, fearing the Mac wasn’t going anywhere, Adobe made Windows its priority. Adobe’s key applications were first written for Windows and then adapted for the Mac. This continued even after Jobs’ “reverse acquisition” of Apple, when he brought NeXT technology and people to breathe new life into the Mac OS (but without Adobe’s Display PostScript, the engine behind the NeXT graphics system). Today, much to Apple’s persistent chagrin, the Mac version of Photoshop is written on an older version of the Mac platform, and the result is perceived as being inferior to the Windows version.
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