Adobe

Both of Adobe’s founders came from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Charles Geschke joined PARC after earning a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1972, helped establish and manage its Imaging Sciences Laboratory in 1978, and then hired John Warnock, who held a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, as principal scientist. In the laboratory, Warnock and a colleague developed JaM, a geometric, procedural graphics language, and Geschke, Warnock and four other researchers then combined it with other techniques to create Xerox’s page description language, Interpress.⁠[1][1][2][3][3]

With Interpress stalled inside PARC, Geschke and Warnock left in 1982 to found Adobe Systems, named after a creek that ran past their homes in Los Altos; the Computer History Museum dates the company’s start to December 1982. Warnock served as a director and chief executive from 1982 and also as president from December 1982 to March 1989; Geschke was a director from 1982 and executive vice president from December 1982 to March 1989. The company was incorporated in California in October 1983 and reincorporated in Delaware in May 1997.⁠[1][3][2][2][4]

Early discussions with computer makers such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Apple convinced the two founders that the key to digital printing was software: any computer should be able to connect with printers and typesetters through a common language. Led by Warnock, Adobe and programmers including Doug Brotz, Bill Paxton and Ed Taft created PostScript, a complete programming language released in 1984. Adobe licensed PostScript to computer makers and printer manufacturers, developed a geometric way to describe typefaces and licensed many well-known typefaces; PostScript and the Adobe Type Library drove the desktop publishing boom from the 1980s and became an international de facto standard.⁠[3][3][3][3][3][3][3][3]

From April 1989, Warnock became chairman and Geschke president. Adobe introduced the image-editing software Photoshop in 1990, which went on to become the standard tool for the prepress, publishing and graphic arts industries. In the 1990s, Warnock championed the development of PDF (Portable Document Format), turning PostScript into a safer, easier basis for digital documents; the Acrobat family of products built around PDF was introduced in 1993. Adobe made the PDF specifications available openly and at no charge, and PDF 1.7 later became the international standard ISO 32000-1:2008.⁠[2][2][2][3][2][5][5]

On August 31, 1994, after approval by both companies’ shareholders and the US Federal Trade Commission, Adobe completed its acquisition of Aldus Corporation, the developer of PageMaker; the FTC’s condition was that the rights to Aldus FreeHand revert to Altsys Corporation in January 1995. Through the acquisition Adobe also obtained After Effects, developed by CoSA, which Aldus had acquired a year earlier. At the end of fiscal 1994, Adobe had 2,051 employees worldwide.⁠[2][2][2][2]

Warnock retired as chief executive in 2000 and shared the chairmanship with Geschke until 2017. Bruce Chizen, who had joined Adobe through the Aldus acquisition, was promoted to president in April 2000 and became chief executive and a board member that December.⁠[6][4][4]

On December 3, 2005, Adobe completed its acquisition of Macromedia, a maker of web and mobile application development software, for about $3.4 billion, gaining product lines including Flash and reorganizing its business structure from fiscal 2006.⁠[4][7]

Shantanu Narayen joined Adobe in January 1998, having previously worked at Silicon Graphics and co-founded the digital photo sharing software company Pictra; he was promoted to president and chief operating officer in January 2005 and became chief executive and a board member in December 2007.⁠[7][7][7]

On October 23, 2009, Adobe completed its acquisition of Omniture, a web analytics and online business optimization company based in Orem, Utah, for about $1.8 billion, creating a new reporting segment for it and entering the digital marketing field.⁠[7][7]

In December 2012, Adobe acquired Behance, a creative portfolio platform with about 1 million members; according to multiple sources, it paid slightly more than $150 million in cash and stock, and the Behance community was integrated into Creative Cloud.⁠[8][9][9][9]

In May 2013, Adobe announced that new features for its creative products would be delivered exclusively to Creative Cloud subscribers and that Creative Suite 6, released in May 2012, would be the last major update for perpetual licensees, and it discontinued further development of the perpetually licensed Creative Suite line in fiscal 2013. Creative Cloud subscribers can download and install the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, InDesign and other products.⁠[8][8][8]

In October 2013, Adobe disclosed that hackers had broken into its network. Adobe believed the attackers had entered the part of its network that handled credit card transactions and accessed a source code repository around mid-August 2013, stealing source code for products including ColdFusion and credit card and other data on about 2.9 million customers; Adobe said the card numbers were encrypted and that it did not believe decrypted numbers had left its network.⁠[10][10][10][10]

On December 11, 2014, Adobe announced an agreement to acquire the royalty-free stock image marketplace Fotolia for about $800 million in cash; the acquisition was completed in January 2015, and Adobe built Adobe StockAdobe StockAdobe Stock is Adobe’s stock content service, launched on June 16, 2015, offering royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates, audio, and 3D assets that can be searched and licensed directly within Adobe apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator. It is built on Fotolia, the stock image website Adobe acquired in 2015, and was one of the sources of training data for the first version of Adobe’s generative AI model Firefly.Open the full entry, a stock content service within Creative Cloud, on it.⁠[11][12]

On July 25, 2017, Adobe announced that, in coordination with partners including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, it planned to stop updating and distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020, and encouraged content creators to migrate Flash content to open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.⁠[13][13][13]

In 2018, Adobe acquired the e-commerce platform Magento (June 18) and the marketing automation company Marketo (October 31), integrating them into Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud respectively. On October 8 of that year, the company filed an amendment to its certificate of incorporation in Delaware changing its legal name from Adobe Systems Incorporated to Adobe Inc.⁠[14][14][15]

Co-founder Charles Geschke died on April 16, 2021, at the age of 81. On October 7 of that year, Adobe completed its acquisition of the cloud video collaboration platform Frame.io for about $1.24 billion.⁠[1][16]

On September 15, 2022, Adobe signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire the interface design platform Figma for about $20 billion, roughly half in cash and half in stock.⁠[16]

On March 21, 2023, Adobe introduced Firefly, a family of generative AI models, and opened a beta of the first model, focused on commercial use and initially on generating images and text effects. Adobe said the first Firefly model was trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content whose copyright had expired, and that it would introduce a “Do Not Train” tag for creators who do not want their content used in model training.⁠[17][17][17][17]

Co-founder John Warnock died on Saturday, August 19, 2023, at the age of 82. Adobe recalled that he had received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2008, as well as the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Entrepreneur Award and the Marconi Prize.⁠[6][6][6][6][6]

The UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an inquiry into the deal on May 3, 2023, moved it to an in-depth Phase 2 investigation on July 13, and on November 28 published provisional findings identifying competition concerns. On December 18, 2023, Adobe and Figma announced that they had mutually agreed to terminate the merger agreement, citing a joint assessment that there was no clear path to the necessary approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority; the CMA then cancelled its inquiry.⁠[18][18][18][19][18]

Narayen said Adobe and Figma strongly disagreed with the recent regulatory findings but believed moving forward independently was in their respective best interests; Figma CEO Dylan Field said it had become clear that regulators did not see the merits of the deal the same way. Under the termination agreement, Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee from cash on hand on December 20, 2023.⁠[19][19][16]

Separately, on October 20, 2023, investors filed a securities class action in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging that Adobe’s public statements between July 2021 and September 2022 about competition from Figma were materially false or misleading; the court dismissed the case in full on March 27, 2025, and the plaintiff has since appealed.⁠[20][20][20][20][20]

In June 2024, Adobe required users to re-accept updated terms of use whose license provisions raised concerns that user content would be used to train AI. On June 10, Adobe said it had never trained generative AI on customer content or taken ownership of customers’ work, that Firefly was trained only on licensed content such as Adobe Stock and public domain content whose copyright had expired, and that it would roll out updated terms making these commitments clear by June 18.⁠[21][22][21][21][21]

Since June 2022, Adobe had been cooperating with a civil investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) into its subscription disclosure and cancellation practices under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). The FTC voted on March 20, 2024, to authorize a case and referred it to the Department of Justice; on June 17, 2024, the Justice Department filed a civil complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Adobe and executives Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, alleging that Adobe used fine print and inconspicuous links to hide key terms, including a hefty early termination fee on its “annual, paid monthly” plan, failed to obtain express informed consent, and obstructed cancellations with convoluted processes, in violation of ROSCA and the FTC Act.⁠[23][23][24][25][23][25][23]

Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Americans were tired of companies hiding the ball during subscription signup and putting up roadblocks when they try to cancel. Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel and chief trust officer, responded that Adobe is transparent about its subscription terms and has a simple cancellation process, and that the company would refute the FTC’s claims in court. Adobe filed a motion to dismiss on October 7, 2024; the court denied it on May 2, 2025, and the case moved into discovery.⁠[24][24][24][23][26]

On November 18, 2025, Adobe signed a definitive agreement to acquire Semrush Holdings, a publicly held brand visibility platform company, for about $1.9 billion in cash; the acquisition was completed on April 28, 2026, for $1.87 billion, primarily in cash, to strengthen its marketing services in search engine optimization, generative engine optimization and agentic search optimization. As of fiscal 2025, Adobe reported three segments, Digital Media, Digital Experience and Publishing and Advertising, with fiscal 2025 total revenue of $23.769 billion, 96% of it from subscriptions.⁠[26][20][20][26][26][26]

On March 9, 2026, Narayen notified Adobe of his decision to transition from the chief executive role; Adobe began a search for his successor, with Narayen remaining chief executive until a successor was appointed and staying on as chair.⁠[27][27]

On March 12, 2026, Adobe reached an agreement with the Justice Department to settle the subscription lawsuit and filed a stipulation of dismissal on March 13. The Justice Department announced the same day that, under the proposed stipulated order, if entered by the court, Adobe would pay $75 million in civil penalties and offer customers $75 million in free services; Adobe would also have to clearly disclose any early termination fee and how it is calculated before enrolling customers, remind customers before converting free trials longer than seven days into paid subscriptions with such a fee, and provide easy ways to cancel. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said the department would strongly oppose any attempt to harm Americans with deceptive and unfair business practices.⁠[20][25][25][25][25][25]

Adobe did not admit wrongdoing, saying that while it agreed to the settlement it disagreed with the government’s claims and maintaining that its subscription terms are transparent. Less than a week after the settlement was announced, the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into whether the early cancellation fees on Adobe’s “annual, billed monthly” plans are unfair, with no conclusion reached at that time.⁠[28][28][28][28]

On September 2, 2026, Adobe’s board appointed Anil Chakravarthy, president of the Customer Experience Orchestration business, as the company’s president and chief executive officer and a board member, effective December 1, 2026, when Narayen will retire as chief executive and become executive chair of the board. The same day, David Wadhwani, president of the Creativity & Productivity business, notified the company that he would step down effective September 27, remaining as a senior advisor for a transition period.⁠[29][29][29]

In early October 2026, ArtCraftArtCraftArtCraft is an open-source AI image and video creation tool founded by Brandon Thomas, with its team based in Atlanta. It grew out of the AI creative company Storyteller and uses 2D and 3D canvases, character posing and scene blocking to control generated results. In October 2026, ArtCraft launched Crafting Apps, a series of open-source applications written in Rust and modeled on major Adobe and Microsoft software; Thomas said they were developed with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, and the project quickly drew attention as well as controversy over its completeness, copyright and security.Open the full entry released seven open-source applications recreating the interfaces and tools of Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. Developer Brandon ThomasBrandon ThomasBrandon Thomas is a software engineer, entrepreneur and independent filmmaker based in Atlanta who formerly worked as an engineer at Square and founded the speech synthesis website FakeYou, the AI creative company Storyteller.ai and the open-source AI image and video tool ArtCraft. In October 2026, under the ArtCraft name, he released seven open-source Rust applications modeled on Adobe’s main programs, saying they were written with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, drawing attention and controversy.Open the full entry said he used AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry’s Claude Opus 5.5 to write these “clean-room replacements” for Adobe’s closed-source software in Rust, and said that being hit by Adobe’s subscription cancellation fee too many times was one reason for the project.⁠[30][30][30]

On October 8, 2026, at a White House Fraud Task Force press conference, US Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling announced the suspension of large IT outsourcing firms CognizantCognizantCognizant (Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation) is a Nasdaq-listed information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey. Most of its employees are in India, and it is one of the major applicants for U.S. H-1B visas; in 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor suspended it from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program, citing an investigation into visa fraud.Open the full entry, InfosysInfosysInfosys (Infosys Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India, founded in 1981 by N. R. Narayana Murthy and six others. Listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of $20.158 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 328,000 employees, and is one of India’s major information technology services companies.Open the full entry, Tata, WiproWiproWipro (Wipro Limited) is an information technology services and consulting company headquartered in Bengaluru, India. It began in 1945 as the vegetable oil maker Western India Vegetable Products and was transformed into an IT company under Azim H. Premji; listed on Indian stock exchanges and the New York Stock Exchange, it had revenues of about $10.5 billion in fiscal 2026 and more than 240,000 employees.Open the full entry, HCL and Capgemini from the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program; he said that, due to multiple active federal investigations, the Labor Department was also suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the program and would neither accept new applications nor process pending ones involving these companies. PERM is generally an employer’s first step in sponsoring a foreign worker for an employment-based green card; the suspension is not a blanket ban on H-1B visas but could disrupt the route to permanent residency for employees already working in the United States.⁠[31][32][32][31][31][33][33]

Sonderling said the suspended companies had together requested nearly 3 million foreign workers since 2009, receiving more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Vice President JD Vance said the suspensions would remain in place “as long as it needs to,” adding that the administration had tools to extend them indefinitely but wanted the companies to change their hiring practices; Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department was investigating companies that favor foreign workers and that, depending on the findings, criminal prosecutions or civil lawsuits were possible. The Labor Department also said it had uncovered $22 billion worth of visa fraud.⁠[31][31][31][31][31][34]

As of the time of the relevant reports, Adobe had not responded to requests for comment from TechCrunch, Al Jazeera or Channel Dive and had not publicly commented on the suspension. Adobe’s shares rose about 2% in late trading that day.⁠[35][34][32][36][34]

Adobe: Official website: https://www.adobe.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[37]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Adobe (opens in a new window)⁠[37]