An interview with Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, founders and chairmen of Adobe systems.

• Author: Chen, Roger
• Position: Interview

JABS: Can you give us an overview of your Asian operations?

A: Overall, our largest market is the United States, next it's Europe, and then Asia and the Pacific Rim. All of Asia together accounts for roughly 20% of our business. Although we have operations in China, Singapore and other parts of Asia, Japan is our biggest market in Asia, partly because Japan is already a very industrialized economy. Furthermore, a lot of the technologies that are important to us, particularly things like lasers and ink jet printers, were all primarily being initially developed in Japan. It is a very good market for technologies, and we recognized that pretty early on. Now, roughly 15% to 20% of our worldwide revenue comes out of Japan. So, the Japanese market is very important for us.

JABS: How do you describe your initial experience when entering the Japanese market?

A: When entering the Japanese market, one of the first things we needed to do was to find vendors who could provide us with the actual art work of the typefaces for printing (Editors' note: typeface is the design of the individual characters making up the text). Once we had access to the Japanese typefaces, our printing products could be used in Japan.

At the time, there were two primary typeface vendors in Japan. One was much larger than the other. The larger one was based in Tokyo and was the market leader. We approached the larger one first because they had the most popular typefaces in Japan. But we had great difficulty dealing with the company. They really didn't want to talk to us. They were in command of and controlled the market. They didn't feel that they needed to deal with new technologies, particularly with Westerners coming into that market.

The second and smaller company that we approached was based in Osaka and they were a pretty distant second. This company began to see that they needed to do something to really vitalize and grow their business. We spent a lot of time talking to them. Initially, it was a difficult decision for them because they had never licensed their trademarks, typefaces, or the information about how to create them. This was because, before Adobe, everything was proprietary in the Japanese printing and publishing industry. A Japanese printing company would typically be locked into one vendor that would capture the entire printing process and there was no way to intermix equipment from other vendors. When we went to Japan, we introduced a universal standard that allowed many vendors to produce compatible products. And once that happened, the innovation, pricing and accessibility all changed. We tried to convince them that they might have millions of people as customers at the time, but we could offer tens of millions of people by them having access to our technology. They finally agreed to deal...