Over the past 38 years, Adobe has built itself into a ~$245 billion market cap company by introducing and then dominating a new category: creative software. Over the next decade and beyond, we see this market evolving and enabling the emergence of multiple billion dollar startups that build upon Adobe’s foundation. These include several companies already well on their way such as Canva, Figma, and others.
Along the way, it has made numerous transformative acquisitions, including Macromedia ($3.4 billion), Omniture ($1.8 billion), and Marketo ($4.8 billion). Its acquisition of Behance ($150 million) also enabled it to build the leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. It has also successfully expanded into new pockets of creative software, which eventually yielded large business lines. Adobe’s ability to consistently innovate through organic and inorganic growth, while successfully transitioning leadership between different CEOs over multiple decades, is one of the tech industry’s great overlooked stories. The company’s Creative Cloud launch and move to a subscription-based pricing model at the end of 2013 precipitated a quadrupling of its market cap since that time.
From the very beginning, Adobe has secured successful partnerships through a thoughtful and strategic approach to choosing the right partners. Adobe’s first product, PostScript, was a page description language, which allowed users to print to external printers. Adobe understood that the proliferation of its software was dependent on high-quality hardware, and it strategically chose to partner with the best hardware company for creative users, Apple. In 1985, Apple debuted the LaserWriter printer with Postscript, and it was the first printer to use the language. Combined with a third partnership with Aldus Software, the trio established the desktop publishing revolution, and elevated Adobe’s positioning within the corporate ecosystem.
Taking this further, Adobe capitalized on this position and cultivated deep partnerships with other large technology companies, such as IBM and Microsoft, ensuring it is deeply entrenched as the defacto creative software suite. Adobe has consistently been able to bundle its products into an integrated suite, while ensuring that value was strong enough for customers to pay a premium price for the bundle.
We present to you, “Top 10 Adobe Solution Companies - 2021.”
