The new Adobe takes on Quark

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 15, 1995 by Wayne Jebian

Adobe Systems, based in Mountain View, California, used to be known for two things: Postscript and Illustrator. Its September 1994 merger with the Seattle-based Aldus Corp. added an array of new products that could bring 13-year-old Adobe - whose 1994 earnings totaled just under $600 million - to the top of the desktop publishing industry.

Indeed, its acquisition of Aldus PageMaker and a suite of Aldus prepress products has analysts swooning. "Adobe is now the most important player in electronic publishing overall, not just in prepress," asserts Bruce Lupatkin, director of research at Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco.

The deal could also inject needed competition into the desktop market. In recent years, Quark Inc.'s QuarkXPress has ruled the high-end page-layout software arena. With PageMaker in the hands of a company known for technical genius and marketing savvy, that could change. "Aldus had been running out of steam, " says David Cole, publisher of "The Cole Papers." "PageMaker had very little market penetration into professional publishing. The merger might enable them to turn things around. "

The new Adobe is hoping it will. Said John Warnock, Adobe's 54-year-old CEO in an interview with Folio: conducted via America Online, "The prepress segment of the business will be a growth segment. We are committing resources to make this a stronger segment in the future. Prepress is moving to the desktop, and we will help make that happen. "

The company took a first step with the recent rebranding of PageMaker 5.0 to Adobe. This version of the page layout program, available for the first time on CD-ROM, includes professional-level typographic controls and built-in color separation, and is packaged with tutorials, extra clip art and 220 free fonts.

"PageMaker has really taken a very aggressive, competitive stance vis-a-vis QuarkXPress," says Lori Birtley, PageMaker senior product marketing manager. "The product direction, the way the product has grown - and the market our product is going after today much more mirror the market Quark is going after." To further the competition, Adobe recently offered XPress users a $199 competitive upgrade to PageMaker 5.0 (usually costing $895); the upgrade shipped with a QuarkXPress converter to enable the importation and preservation of XPress legacy documents.

Adobe recognizes that "many magazine users stopped looking at PageMaker around version 3.0," says Birtley. "Something has to be compelling to make them took again at PageMaker. " Adobe intends to provide those incentives in the next version. Birtley hinted that, in addition to increased support of color, there may be Internet compatibility - perhaps an Acrobat portable document format (PDF) filter and/or the ability to imbed HTML tags automatically.

Birtley also promised greater compatibility among an of Adobe's publishing-related products, including Illustrator, Photoshop and TrapWise. "Being suddenly the company that owns Post-Script makes things very good for us," she says. "We'll be able to make workflow easier and faster." Part of the long-term strategy is also to make Plug-Ins seamless across products.

Proceed with caution

Immediately after the merger, Adobe was hard-pressed to keep up with demands for product support, causing much concern among users and analysts. For example, some units of Photoshop 3.0 that shipped in late 1994 had a flaw that caused the program to expire at the end of the year. Adobe made a free software fix available, but a quick check of online discussion boards revealed that many users had difficulty installing the patch. Others complained about Adobe's intransigence in acknowledging the problem. Adobe officials concede that the merger temporarily hindered customer-service. "We were taken completely by surprise, and for a while technical support went down the toilet," admits LaVon Peck, Adobe senior public relations manager.

The beefed-up company seems to have a chance to reach its next goal, becoming, in Warnock's words, "the premier supplier of authoring tools in the various media areas: print, presentations, video, multimedia (CD) and online services. "

Look for announcements about the revamped version of PageMaker toward the end of the summer.