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Nick Hodge is a professional geek and digital diplomat for Microsoft in Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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Adobe Forums

By Nick Hodge | August 2, 2003

Hello visitors from adobeforums.com. How to print in greyscale; including placed EPS and PDF: InDesign 2.0: Printing Output Choices and Flattener Tricks (including force Greyscale export!)

Today marks my 5th year at Adobe Systems. On this day, 5 years ago, I was in San Jose getting the "good oil" on Adobe products with other Application Engineers. Some are still with Adobe, many are not.

At this time, Adobe had just release Photoshop 5.0 and were about to release Illustrator 8. Acrobat 3.0 was all the rage, and InDesign (or K2 as it was codenamed) had been shown to customers under strict NDA guidelines. Also, at about this time, a small Denver-based company called Quark offered to purchase Adobe. In September, Adobe went through a traumatic round of restructuring. Having recently joined the company from 3 years of Apple turmoil, things seemed, well, normal.

I was recently asked by Karl DeAbrew from Planetpdf.com, who I met in Melbourne very soon after joining, "Why are you still at Adobe after five years?" Here are my reasons:

The Adobe people with whom I work. Especially the local Pacific and South Asia team.
Our customers. They are as passionate about our products as we are. Unlike other pieces of software, ours is directly connected to how they earn a crust.
The technology, and being able to influence what happens to it (albeit in a small way). Adobe takes what we see and hear from our customers, adds a dose of "crystal ball gazing" and makes really cool stuff.

It has been a very interesting 5 years. In Australia, film was king. PDF was seen as "an interesting future,
" but not good enough for print quality. QuarkXpress 3.32 was the industry standard for output, too. Since 1998, PDF has taken over as digital film. InDesign has stolen the lead from Xpress.

And wow, have I learnt lots. I must thank many people who have educated me in the ways of software.

The culture of Adobe is very unique. Its a mixture of "go get 'em" sales and marketing might, along with conservative financial control and geeky technology savvy.

Here's to another 5 years. I wonder what the future holds?

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