War on Adobe
Jess Weatherbed (Hacker News):
All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe’s time has come.
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Pricing in particular has given competitors an opening to attack. Some of the best alternatives aren’t just undercutting Adobe’s price — they’re available for free. People love free.
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Perhaps coincidently, Canva also dropped its own bomb on Adobe’s After Effects this week. Canva has made the full version of Cavalry available for free instead of locking the motion graphics software behind its own user subscriptions, after the design platform acquired it back in February. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Canva did a similar thing last year with Affinity — a trio of apps it acquired that provide similar features to Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign software.
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Other Adobe apps also took a hit this week thanks to the latest DaVinci Resolve 21 update. The free multipurpose post-production software — which is already considered a rival to Premiere Pro — now includes photo editing features like color-correction, masking tools, and import support for Apple Photos and Lightroom Catalog files.
Jaron Schneider (Hacker News):
No, you would no longer really “own” the software, but Adobe promised that, in exchange, going cloud-based meant that it would be more agile and better able to deliver updates and features to users. You also would, theoretically, save a lot of money by not having to purchase the physical Creative Suite disks.
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I don’t think that has wholly changed in the last decade-plus, as I know there are still people at Adobe who feel the same way — I met them just two years ago when I visited with the PetaPixel Podcast team. But the difference is the corporation around those people has changed, and now those people are no longer encouraged to talk to the public the way they once were.
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Adobe started to shift its focus to enticing those corporate customers to the detriment of its connection to the customers that gave it success to begin with. […] Adobe not so much forgot who its users were, but instead it actively decided they no longer mattered. It believed it had become so big, so mighty, and so important that it could move beyond them. What arrogance.
I think Adobe has actually shipped worse products as a result of this strategy — and, for once, I will avoid making it all about bugs, of which there are many. Adobe’s applications are more capable than they ever have been, but they are also often worse for professionals in actual use as a direct result of the company’s software-as-a-service model. Nearly every application contains upsells or supposedly helpful alerts that are actually ads for other Adobe services. These promotions are particularly aggressive in pushing artificial intelligence tools. Even software as relatively simple as Acrobat cannot help but promote its ability to summarize a two-page document, and then suggest you store it with Adobe’s cloud service instead of sending it as an attachment.
This stuff gets in the way of professionals trying to do their job. Adobe was pressured into adding a “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop to hide most of these things, but not all of them, and only in Photoshop. It only underscores how much Adobe views its software as something it gives people permission to use, instead of tools it makes to help people get their work done.
In that time, Adobe has added features, but the shift to Creative Cloud meant that the company has taken up rent-seeking and the general behavior seems to include unfixed bugs, bloat, and disrespecting its users.
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I’d be willing to overlook a lot of this if the software continued to get better, but the software has strayed so far from even feeling like it belongs on a Mac. Even one of the common practices to resolve issues using the Creative Cloud Cleaner tool makes the whole thing feel like ’90s Microsoft at best and malware at worst.
Previously:
- Photoshop’s “Modern” Spectrum User Interface
- Apple Creator Studio
- Combined Affinity Studio Now Free
- Figma Files for IPO
- Does Apple Smell Blood in the Water?
- Apple Acquires Pixelmator
- The Rise of Canva
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Just historically, statistically speaking, Adobe will fail, sooner than later, it's an economical fact. Every company that has become full blinders-on mode ignorant of every metric except profits, fails rapidly. Your product can only suck so much before people just won't do it anymore. I don't look forward to what that will mean for me and my 170,000+ image Lightroom catalog. Right now, it would mean a TON of work, but I *could* go back to v6 if I HAD to.
@Rick… Adobe changed their catalogue database, so while you could go back to non-CC era Lightroom, you would literally be starting from zero. Yes, all your RAW/DNG files are there, but all your edits, collections, virtual copies, etc will be gone.
So yeah, not just a lot of work, *all* the work.
Could it be that ensh!tification is a bad long-term strategy? Imagine if that got taught at business school. (Sarcasm aside, hopefully a few big trees like Adobe fall and it actually is.)
