John Warnock
John Warnock
John Edward Warnockis an American computer scientist and businessman best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company. Dr. Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and Chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company. Although retired as CEO in 2000, he still co-chairs the board with Geschke. Warnock has pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, Web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 October 1940
CountryUnited States of America
What I try to do is factor in how people use computers, what people's problems are, and how these technologies can get applied to those problems. Then I try to direct the various product groups to act on this information.
I believe good software is written by small teams of two, three, or four people interacting with each other at a very, high dense level.
I have seen that technology has contributed to improved communication, that it's contributed to better health care, that it's contributed to better food supplies, that it has contributed to all the basic human needs.
Without television and mass communication, that knowledge wouldn't exist. So I think it actually has the possibility of turning people into more understanding and more empathetic people.
The end game is to get to a point where there aren't any user interfaces.
You can do some kind of planning, but the future is something you'll never be able to predict. If anybody had told me when I was in high school or when I was in college that I would be running a billion-dollar company, I would have told them, "You're crazy." First of all, I had no interest in business. No interest, none whatsoever. I never took a course in business.
We look at their ability to learn, how fast they are, how quick they are. And their experience. What have they done with their life? What concrete accomplishments have they made? Are they a finisher? When they start a project, can they finish the project, or do they start 20 projects and then have them all open-ended?