John Warnock and Charles Geschke left Xerox PARC frustrated that the company wouldn't commercialize their laser printer technology. They founded Adobe to turn that research into products, while Xerox stayed focused on its existing business.
You know how Adobe started? Dude, you want to know a fun story? Just a little tangent with Adobe because Adobe is one of, you know, you've worked with Adobe, right? Yeah. So that book I'm reading again, In the Company of Giants, that little book, it talks about how Adobe started. Do you know how Adobe started? So you've heard of Xerox PARC before, right? I've heard of Xerox, the company. Xerox, like they were known for what? Copy machines in the past, right? And they're multi-billions and billions and billions, right? They actually started a division called Xerox PARC. And this is where Steve Jobs went to visit. And that's where he found the GUI, the graphical user interface, and he saw the mouse and the keyboard. Xerox PARC had a division that was coming up with all these new products, but products— or sorry, research— researching these new products, research and product never connected. So they never got these products out to market. So these things went to die. The 2 Adobe co-founders worked there and they were very frustrated that their stuff, the cool stuff they were building, was never making it out because they were printing money with the copy machines. That's why they started Adobe. And I think they started with laser printers or whatever, and that's how it became what it became. And Adobe is much bigger than Xerox at this point. I mean, is Xerox even around anymore? No, they're around. They're for sure around. Xerox is a $626 million company. So what's interesting to me is you look at Xerox, they had all the cards, right? And they just— had they just said, hey, let's take the research stuff and maybe let's productize some of this and not just focus on the cash cow, maybe like 10% of the resources focused on the new stuff.
