By Scott Wong

Luck and timing — that’s what Charles Geschke and John Warnock attribute to their Silicon Valley Cinderella story.

The Adobe Systems co-founders, who met at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s, spoke at Moffett Field Nov. 12 to more than 100 people about how their software revolutionized desktop publishing and made it a $1.2 billion a year mainstay in a constantly shifting high-tech industry.

Geschke said Adobe, which was only one of eight or nine laser printing companies in the early 1980s, stayed afloat while others sank, because of one key partner — Apple Computer Inc.

“It was luck and timing,” he said. “It was getting the right partner at the right time.”

In 1985 Apple founder Steve Jobs was looking for something to jump-start his year-old computer, the Macintosh. He called Adobe’s Postscript, a programming language used to control output devices like printers, “a match made in heaven” for the company’s LaserWriter printer, Geschke said.

Jobs offered to buy Adobe, named after the creek behind Warnock’s Los Altos home, for $5 million. The founders declined the offer and instead settled on a $2.5 million investment from the ailing Apple.

“The LaserWriter was what helped Apple succeed and generated a whole new industry,” Geschke said.

The softer-spoken Geschke, also a Los Altos resident, made national headlines in May 1992 after he was kidnapped from the Adobe parking lot and held for $650,000 ransom for five days before being rescued. Geschke comes from a family of printers. Both his grandfather and father were letterpress photoengravers.

Over its 20-year span, Adobe has released many major publishing software programs, including PageMaker, Photoshop and Acrobat.

Acrobat, introduced in 1994, is now Adobe’s largest grossing product. Initially Acrobat was something that had no demonstrable market, but it gained enormous power after the Internet, Warnock said.

“(Acrobat) was one of the Holy Grails of computers — getting documents to travel across computers,” Warnock said.

For aspiring engineers and inventors, Warnock said, “To hit the dot, you’ve got to shoot ahead of it.”

“The goal is not to make a better Microsoft Word, but to look at the trends and change (computer users’) behavior habits,” he said. “People have to get used to the idea that there might be a better mousetrap out there.”

When asked about his thoughts on Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corporation, Warnock said he wouldn’t give the computer giant credit for inventing anything.

According to Warnock, the Microsoft empire never succeeded in driving Adobe out of the industry, because it lacked “good taste.”

“In our domain of publishing and graphic art, taste is really important,” he said. “I use PCs, but I don’t particularly care for them. Macs exhibit a great deal of taste.”

Both Geschke and Warnock said they believe a company must maintain balance among its four constituencies — customers, employees, shareholders and the community in which the company operates — in order to be successful.

“At times you have to say, ‘Screw the stockholders, the customers are more important,’” Warnock said. “Or at times you have to say, ‘Screw the customers, the employees are more important.’”

Although the customer is an important part of the company, it by no means dictates the market, Geschke said.

“The customer doesn’t know what to ask for. We designed something that was way beyond what (customers) knew how to request,” Geschke said. “A customer will narrow down your vision.”

The founders were never “coin-operated,” Warnock said. “We did this to build products that people actually used.”

Geschke said that may sum up the greatest accomplishment of his 20 years of work at Adobe.

“Whenever I travel around the world, people walk up to me and say, ‘Your product has made a difference in my life,’” he said. “At the end of the day, that is the greatest reward.”

Geschke and Warnock currently serve as chairmen of the board of Adobe.

The lecture was sponsored by the Computer History Museum, located at Building T-12A, Moffett Airfield in Mountain View. The next lecture sponsored by the museum is by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, 7 p.m., Dec. 10.

For more information on the museum or the lecture, call 604-2579, e-mail or logon to www.computerhistory.org.