Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/03/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> Corporate greed has no moral component to it? Maybe in Switzerland. The founders of Adobe are dear friends of mine. One of them is the godfather of my children. One of the founders (Warnock) is retired; the other (Geschke) is still onboard as CEO. I know them well, I know their company well, I know the people well. A few months ago the CEO had a party at his house to celebrate the contributions of the 20 earliest people at Adobe. I was invited to it. Adobe does not make "obscene" profits on Photoshop. They make solid profits, but nothing out of the ordinary. They have a very good product, and they price it so that they can afford to keep improving it. One of the reasons why they are still in business 20 years after they were founded is that they have managed to price their products properly. They make enough profit that they don't need to be bought out to stay alive. They use that profit to treat their employees well and to make a very high quality product. There are nearly 100 people involved in engineering and documenting Photoshop. Here in California, people of that caliber need to be paid well; I suspect that the salary/benefits budget for Photoshop development is around US$20 million per year. They have to sell 50,000 to 70,000 copies of Photoshop just to pay the salaries of its creators. These creators are not greedy corporate slime, they are my neighbors. Photoshop is an astonishingly reliable program. It pretty much stands alone among computer programs that I have used in the last decade, as totally bug-free. Every release of Photoshop for every platform has been solid, reliable, compatible, documented, supported, etc. I think there were a couple of small problems in 4.0 for Windows; nothing important, but they were fixed quickly and free. People don't buy the next release of Photoshop to get around all of the bugs in the previous release. They buy the next release of Photoshop because it does things that they really want. Both Warnock and Geschke are the most moral and honorable people you will ever meet. I have nothing negative to say about either of them, except perhaps that Geschke smokes cheap cigars. Warnock has used the money he made from Adobe to found Octavo, which is devoted to preserving rare books and making them available (in digital form) to the public. Octavo could never have been started with venture capital; it is a labor of love and not of profit. Geschke has generously supported various local charities, historical societies, museums, universities, and so on. He is one of the very few computer-industry executives to donate money without holding a press conference to brag about it or demanding that his name be put on buildings. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html