Devils and dues
Love Adobe or hate 'em, you've got to give them their due. They've stood up to (and when it suits them, with) both Microsoft and Apple, absorbed Aldus, conquered Corel and wounded Quark, while taking on every start-up who's tried every combination of price and features against them.
And they charge these prices and they get them.
Not to mention that they've changed the idea of what a GUI is, what photography and drawing are, and have changed society's whole relationship to images, and raised questions about what is real, what is evidence. And have added a new verb to the language in a way that hasn't been seen since we began "xeroxing."
How many true healthy software survivors from the Apple II/MS-DOS heydays are there? Marginalized: WordPerfect, Novell, Quattro Pro, Borland, many others. Gone: Ashton-Tate (dBase), Lotus 1-2-3 (the original gold mine "killer app"), Commodore, Atari and other really sizeable, famous in their day companies. And IBM from IBM-PC software and hardware.
Maybe Electronic Arts is another hugely profitable survivor if they're the old-time company I think they are. Oracle wasn't a PC company, Sun wasn't and is foundering.
But in terms of original PC-era software developers with high public awareness and impact on technology and society it's clearly Apple, Adobe and Microsoft. Any others?
And no low-gross-margin cut-rate companies in that titanic trio.....
Moral: Trying to compete in software as a commodity is a losing game. You've got to be bold, outmarket and/or out-engineer the competition, get market-share and mind-share lock-in and hold it. (Well, it sounds simple....)
I'm just happy that Acrobat has been so thoroughly reverse-engineered. Way too proprietary for a document "standard" you have to pay big bucks to be able to edit. I use Fox-it reader on my PC and Preview on my Mac.