Co-founder and CEO of Software Publishing Corporation (SPC), best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program, Gibbons cofounded the Mountain View, California-based company in 1980 along with two other former Hewlett-Packard employees, Janelle Bedke and John Page, with an eye to producing packaged software for personal computers like the Apple II.
His professional career began at Hewlett-Packard, followed by several successful startups. SPC was originally well known for its "pfs:" series—and its subsequent "pfs:First" and "pfs:Professional" derivative series—of business software products. The company was ultimately best known for its pioneering Harvard Graphics business and presentation graphics program.
Though SPC's earliest product was for the Apple II personal computer, most of its products were for use on text-based DOS desktop computers, with non-graphical user interfaces, long before the graphical GUI of either Macintosh or Microsoft Windows existed. A salient benefit of Harvard Graphics, then, was that it brought sophisticated on-screen graphics capabilities to computers running the normally non-graphical, text-based DOS operating system.
Gibbons has served as a Consulting Professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Electrical Engineering in Palo Alto, California, teaching Business Management to EE/CS students in EE204, with broad areas of study including mechanics, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, computer programming, and humanities. He holds a BS and MS degree in EE/CS from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and has received the Alumni of the Year award from Michigan and the 20th Century American Leader award from Harvard Business School. He has been involved in new venture investing in companies including Electronic Arts and Yahoo, and has served on the boards of several Silicon Valley companies. Gibbons also participated in the incubation process of startup companies.
He is additionally a recognized California Plein Air painter — "plein air" being a French expression meaning "in the open air," particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors. His other avocations include flying (airline transport pilot, jet type rating), scuba diving, reading, and sailing.
