As the desktop publishing market stalls, John Warnock is rebuilding Adobe Systems as a maker of software for the enterprise, small office, and consumer markets.
The big picture
Adobe's franchise today depends heavily on its graphics division. In 1996, Dataquest reports, 52.7 percent of Adobe's revenues derived from four of its software products: Photoshop (imaging), Illustrator (drawing), PageMaker (page layout), and Premiere (video editing). Photoshop commands an overwhelming 75 percent of the market for photo and image editing software. Corel's Photo-Paint, with just 10.6 percent, is the closest competitor. Adobe's Illustrator holds 24.9 percent of the drawing and illustration market, second to Corel's CorelDraw; Macromedia ranks third with 12.5 percent for FreeHand. (Macromedia, which ran into trouble in 1997, may be on the rebound as an Adobe competitor in the Internet market, thanks to a new focus on Web publishing.) And Adobe's PageMaker controls 30.5 percent of the desktop publishing market, ranking second only to QuarkXPress, which owns 38.7 percent.
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