PDF has established itself as an interchange format now.
Did people get it - straight away - as to what it was for?
Was it like PostScript was - relatively a howling, roaring, success from day one?
I mean people couldn't wait to buy PostScript in 1985. I'm not kidding they
were pressing cheques into Steve Jobs' and John Warnock's hands and saying: "How much? How much? I want
that NOW and I want it quicker next year!" It wasn't like that with PDF - it wasn't at all.
This was brought home to me in the most amusing - but at the time - scary way in
I think was the mid-nineties. My guess would be it would be round about
1996. I was visiting Adobe fairly regularly doing lots of stuff with them
on PDF and so on. And on this particular occasion San Francisco immigration gets
hold of my passport and said: "Purpose of visit, Sir ?"
"Business or pleasure?" I said: "Well it's business". "Oh! which company are you visiting?"
I said: "Oh! it's Adobe. They're in San Jose now". "Ah! that's interesting, Sir, and what work are you
you doing with them?" I think it's the usual thing that we all get used to is:
"Are you an illegal immigrant; are you actually working for Adobe?" or "Are they
paying you; are you an employee, Sir?". "No! no! no! it's just that we are interested in
the same things; we're doing research and I'm just here for a catch-up and various
meetings with people as to where we are with our project". And he said; "But what
kind of work do you do with Adobe, Sir?" and I said: "Well you may not have heard
of it but they do have a product - a format if you like - called PDF, and you can
read it with a free thing called Acrobat Reader". And his face froze and I thought "Oh! dear"
and he took his glasses off. He put them down and he turned my passport over, put it to one side, and said:
"Sir! that PDF! What is it FOR?!" And I just ... I'd heard similar things from other people, I
just grinned. I said: "Well, do you want the five minute story or the one hour story?"
I'll try and keep it as brief as I can. I said to him: "Look, you know you
probably exchange documents with people and you've been told - you've been told
you should use this route to PDF and use PDF as your standard interchange format?" And he said:
"Yeah! Yeah! that's quite right. We can't understand why we can't just send each
other Word files!" And I said "Well, you'll know some of the problems of sending each
other Word files. Everybody's
got a slightly different version and - oh! dear - some people are running it
on Macintosh and not on PC and it doesn't look the same ...?" "Oh! tell me about it!" he said
And I said:" Well ... and then there's the refuseniks who say: 'WordPerfect is a far better
and I absolutely refuse to use anything from Microsoft' -- or whatever?!"
"Oh yeah! We got a few of those as well". So I said: "Well the thing to remember is - it is
about document exchange. but it needs to be, ideally, you want a general solution
that's of high-quality that could serve all sorts of other use cases. Just
consider newspapers they want something which is accurate and will print out on
an enormous sheet of paper. But yet they want to preview it at smaller sizes and they
want one document to fit a whole load of sizes and resolutions and to move
seamlessly between them taking quality all the time - that it doesn't start
breaking up - even if you inflate it to almost the size of a barn door. And I
said; "Newspapers really, really, value that capability of it" And he said: "So, like,
they have a route to this PDF?" And I said: "Yes, they've got to have a route to PDF and
I said "The other people -
let me give you one more example", I said, is that many of my colleagues think it's
just magic for output from a program called AutoCAD, you know,
"computer-aided design" it could be used for architects drawings; it could be used for
electronics engineering circuit diagrams. But the great thing for them is that
when you scale it up to a different size it keeps the quality and by that I mean
that if it's drawn as a nice smooth looking circle, at this kind of size, you
scale it up and the circle still looks like a circle. It doesn't start breaking
up into dots.
It's a graphics model; it's a sophisticated, scalable, graphics model inside the thing.
And that's why engineers love it as well. And at that stage a great grin came over his face
and he said: "Sir!"
-- puts glasses back on -- "Sir, thank you so much for that!"
"Thank you! thank you! ". He gives me my passport back:
"Welcome to the United States, Sir". So I went away thinking "I'm not too surprised by
that - a lot of people really don't get it; don't understand what it's for". And I
did think -- I don't think it was quite on that trip, it might have been the next
year that I'd been involved with Adobe, on and off, for many years but
particularly in early '93. John Warnock and his colleague Chuck Geschke chose us here at
Nottingham to be one of the first beta test sites for PDF. And I think it was maybe
the year after my interaction with the immigration official and I went to see
John and I said, first question was, I said: "John. PDF - how's it going?"
And he said: "David, it's a long, long, long, uphill struggle!" And i said "Yeah, I can
tell it's not been kind of the overnight success that PostScript was?" And he said:
"No, it isn't. And he said "If you want to ask me how much I've spent already on PDF
the answer is $100 million. It dawned on us straight away, that if we want people to
adopt PDF you absolutely have to give them a Reader and it must be free.
The moment you start charging for it people will just refuse and will not use
your format. So he said "We've had to live with that" but he said "I'll say it again
- we are sure we are right!". So I went then downstairs to talk to my colleague, Ken, who I
think was my liaison person at the time and told him this story. He said: "David,
those of us on the technical side of things - we know that John and Chuck are absolutely
right". "But" he said, "I have to tell you that within this company there's jitters,
there's nerves, because particularly among the sales staff you see, they say
'We don't get any bonuses out of PDF!
People don't understand what it is, y'know,
and all that. Please put me in charge of Photoshop! I'll make loads and loads of
money and bonuses out of Photoshop. And I said; "Yeah! it's understandable". And having
heard from friends at Adobe about how being in charge of Photoshop was deemed to be
the real ....
I thought; "Well, you know, the measure of PDF success is going to be when, if ever,
will its sales revenues overtake those of Photoshop?" And the answer to that I
think it's in - I've got a book somewhere called 'The Adobe Story' - I think it was April 2004
when finally PDF revenues overtook those from Photoshop. And
in my visit, around about that time, with great hilarity, the Photoshop mob as I
recall were on the lower floors of the San Jose building around about four to
six, or something like that.
The PDF/Acrobat/PostScript people were much higher up: floors 11 and 12. The top
management, John and Chuck and so on, were up at the top of the tower. And I was told
when I got there that - to great hilarity - the moment the sales results were
announced and PDF / Acrobat sales had overtaken Photoshop, large quantities of
champagne were sent from floor 4 up to floor 12, with ribbons and congratulations
cards, and the message was: "The pressure's on you guys now -- have a nice day !"