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In favor of what, though? You can replace Premiere with Avid and InDesign with Quark, but what replaces After Effects? PhotoShop? Illustrator? And for the profe

In favor of what, though? You can replace Premiere with Avid and InDesign with Quark, but what replaces After Effects? PhotoShop? Illustrator? And for the professionals that depend on these tools, retraining is a major pain, equivalent to saying to an experienced vim user that they have to switch to BBEdit.

bborud 7y ago
I was a bit surprised to find that quite a few of my friends who traditionally used Photoshop and Illustrator in their work either have transitioned to Affinity products, or are making a conscious effort to look for alternatives. I would have thought it would take longer and/or that people would be extremely tied to their tools. But you do make a point. Often there is no obvious alternative. And changing tools has a cost. Mostly because they want to pay for software and then not have it stop working on them for silly reasons, but also due to a general "bullshit fatigue" with Adobe. It isn't a company that cares a great deal about its users. I did something similar a few years ago. After Oracle ended up buying Sun, I really wanted to stop using Java since I didn't feel Oracle was a company that I would want to do business with. However, it took me several years to transition away from Java. I really liked Java. Finding a new programming language that is suitable for the kind of work you do, has enough of a community etc. isn't just a matter of deciding to move. You need somewhere to move to. Eventually Go evolved to where it fit my needs really well, so I managed to make the transition. 2-3 years later and I haven't touched Java since. (Which was somewhat unexpected. I didn't expect changing languages would be that fast, but it coincided well with new projects etc). As for switching editors, VSCode managed to attract 2.6M monthly users in roughly 2 years. If you believe estimates of how many developers that are in the world, and you squint a bit when comparing numbers, that's roughly in the neighborhood of 10% of the global developer population. My intuition says you are right. The data seems seems to suggest it wants to disagree with both of us :-)

bborud 7y ago

I was a bit surprised to find that quite a few of my friends who traditionally used Photoshop and Illustrator in their work either have transitioned to Affinity products, or are making a conscious effort to look for alternatives. I would have thought it would take longer and/or that people would be extremely tied to their tools. But you do make a point. Often there is no obvious alternative. And changing tools has a cost. Mostly because they want to pay for software and then not have it stop working on them for silly reasons, but also due to a general "bullshit fatigue" with Adobe. It isn't a company that cares a great deal about its users. I did something similar a few years ago. After Oracle ended up buying Sun, I really wanted to stop using Java since I didn't feel Oracle was a company that I would want to do business with. However, it took me several years to transition away from Java. I really liked Java. Finding a new programming language that is suitable for the kind of work you do, has enough of a community etc. isn't just a matter of deciding to move. You need somewhere to move to. Eventually Go evolved to where it fit my needs really well, so I managed to make the transition. 2-3 years later and I haven't touched Java since. (Which was somewhat unexpected. I didn't expect changing languages would be that fast, but it coincided well with new projects etc). As for switching editors, VSCode managed to attract 2.6M monthly users in roughly 2 years. If you believe estimates of how many developers that are in the world, and you squint a bit when comparing numbers, that's roughly in the neighborhood of 10% of the global developer population. My intuition says you are right. The data seems seems to suggest it wants to disagree with both of us :-)