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I'm genuinely interested at your/anyone's analysis as to why Adobe has run out all its competitors for the last 20 years. I understand the "Everyone requires PS

by tajen 10y ago

I'm genuinely interested at your/anyone's analysis as to why Adobe has run out all its competitors for the last 20 years. I understand the "Everyone requires PSD files", but did Adobe have a major advantage? Did they have specific prices as some time to gain adoption? Did they draw out the competitors' best engineers?

mschuster91 10y ago
> but did Adobe have a major advantage? Basically, piracy. They've tolerated cracks and keygens all over the place up until CS6 (it always was just a keygen plus a couple entries in /etc/hosts) - which were mostly used by school kids who literally grew up using only Adobe products and so demanded Adobe products during their educational and professional life too. "Get 'em hooked while they're young" is a business strategy that can work very good.
orionblastar 10y ago
Adobe branches out into many different types of software for Windows and the Mac. They have more than just Photoshop. As I recall they gave a good student discount for education that the other competitors did not do. Once you get the students hooked on it, they beg their employers to buy it for them so they can use their skills on it. Also Adobe had Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash and other free apps that would get people to their website and order Photoshop or the full package. Deluxe Paint was only for Amiga, DOS, and a few other platforms. It was used mostly for video games and designing graphics on it. Electonic Arts had it along with Game Construction games and other things. Quark was faster than Photoshop but cost more, Adobe had basically undercut them even if it wasn't as snappy as Quark could be. Paint.Net and The Gimp are too free/open source alternatives to Photoshop but can't match PS' filters and other things like plug-ins. In doing a bundle, Adobe did what Microsoft did for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc and made it into an Offie Suite. It really does not matter what company had a product out first, what matters is being able to bundle to lower the price, innovate, and offer a student discount, etc to get more customers. I used an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, it was fun, and did what I wanted it to do. It might have been out before Photoshop, but once Photoshop had plug-ins and filters and other stuff, it basically out-innovated Deluxe Paint and others. Then undercut them in price by bundling software.

by tajen 10y ago

mschuster91 10y ago

> but did Adobe have a major advantage? Basically, piracy. They've tolerated cracks and keygens all over the place up until CS6 (it always was just a keygen plus a couple entries in /etc/hosts) - which were mostly used by school kids who literally grew up using only Adobe products and so demanded Adobe products during their educational and professional life too. "Get 'em hooked while they're young" is a business strategy that can work very good.

orionblastar 10y ago

Adobe branches out into many different types of software for Windows and the Mac. They have more than just Photoshop. As I recall they gave a good student discount for education that the other competitors did not do. Once you get the students hooked on it, they beg their employers to buy it for them so they can use their skills on it. Also Adobe had Acrobat Reader, Shockwave, Flash and other free apps that would get people to their website and order Photoshop or the full package. Deluxe Paint was only for Amiga, DOS, and a few other platforms. It was used mostly for video games and designing graphics on it. Electonic Arts had it along with Game Construction games and other things. Quark was faster than Photoshop but cost more, Adobe had basically undercut them even if it wasn't as snappy as Quark could be. Paint.Net and The Gimp are too free/open source alternatives to Photoshop but can't match PS' filters and other things like plug-ins. In doing a bundle, Adobe did what Microsoft did for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc and made it into an Offie Suite. It really does not matter what company had a product out first, what matters is being able to bundle to lower the price, innovate, and offer a student discount, etc to get more customers. I used an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, it was fun, and did what I wanted it to do. It might have been out before Photoshop, but once Photoshop had plug-ins and filters and other stuff, it basically out-innovated Deluxe Paint and others. Then undercut them in price by bundling software.