Adobe Case
1.How was Postscript established as a de facto standard? John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded Adobe Systems Inc. in 1982. Its first product is PostScript. It has three parts:(1) a page description language, (2) an interpreter and (3) fonts.
Adobe make the PostScript language open to anyone for free, and the language was meticulously documented in "The red book", and strong technical support was provided to third-party developers working with the language. As a result, the number of applications supporting PostScript increased dramatically, from 180 in 1986 to over 5000 by 1991.
Adobe licensed PostScript interpreter technology to printer and imagesetter manufacturers on a royalty basis. And to accelerate the diffusion of PostScript output devices, Adobe let printer manufacturers interested in licensing PostScript had free access to its design which is a boilerplate controller based on the Motorola 68000 chip. Therefore the development time for PostScript products is accelerated. What's more, Adobe engineers often worked on joint product development teams with customers in order to help with the design of customized PostScript interpreters. This lead to the increase in the number of PostScript from just one--Apple in 1985 to 60 in 1994.
PostScript provided a way for describing high-quality professional fonts in a standard format. Instead of being used for a font on the specific output device for which it was designed, PostScript font could be used on any PostScript output device. And PostScript also significantly increased the ability to manipulate fonts, allowing for scaling and rotating. And Adobe invested a large amount in creating its own library of PostScript fonts, making the number of PostScript fonts in the Adobe collection increased from 35 in 1985 to 2000 in 1994.
2.How did Adobe make money from Postscript, despite its being an "open" standard?
Adobe did this mainly through two ways: ownership and leveraging.
The PostScript products were firstly
Adobe make the PostScript language open to anyone for free, and the language was meticulously documented in "The red book", and strong technical support was provided to third-party developers working with the language. As a result, the number of applications supporting PostScript increased dramatically, from 180 in 1986 to over 5000 by 1991.
Adobe licensed PostScript interpreter technology to printer and imagesetter manufacturers on a royalty basis. And to accelerate the diffusion of PostScript output devices, Adobe let printer manufacturers interested in licensing PostScript had free access to its design which is a boilerplate controller based on the Motorola 68000 chip. Therefore the development time for PostScript products is accelerated. What's more, Adobe engineers often worked on joint product development teams with customers in order to help with the design of customized PostScript interpreters. This lead to the increase in the number of PostScript from just one--Apple in 1985 to 60 in 1994.
PostScript provided a way for describing high-quality professional fonts in a standard format. Instead of being used for a font on the specific output device for which it was designed, PostScript font could be used on any PostScript output device. And PostScript also significantly increased the ability to manipulate fonts, allowing for scaling and rotating. And Adobe invested a large amount in creating its own library of PostScript fonts, making the number of PostScript fonts in the Adobe collection increased from 35 in 1985 to 2000 in 1994.
2.How did Adobe make money from Postscript, despite its being an "open" standard?
Adobe did this mainly through two ways: ownership and leveraging.
The PostScript products were firstly