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Oh dear, thank you so very much genuinely for your excellent history. Unfortunately I think this is going to leave me with the loss, since I last backed up my d

Oh dear, thank you so very much genuinely for your excellent history. Unfortunately I think this is going to leave me with the loss, since I last backed up my design workstation to tape conveniently the just far enough distant past and (dealing with long-term injury that I am only recently overcome sufficiently for picking up my WACOM pen again) only the last month or so have been planning on restoring. Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm? Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?

tomduncalf 6y ago
I’ve noticed a few companies seemingly pricing things higher than you’d think was sensible (the one that struck me recently is Contentful, who’s pricing tiers quickly jump up to “far too expensive for a small company”)... my assumption is they’ve made a decision that they are better served going after the customers who can pay more and leaving the rest to the competitors. I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more. But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again. I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!
- f311a 6y ago
  Affinity Designer is my best purchase this year. I don't need to use my graphics editor every single week or month, and it does not make any sense to pay Adobe on a subscription basis.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    Affinity looks like the most promising replacement for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model. They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings. But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      >They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        It's mostly just dumb little things. You can transform elements using exact numerical values in some contexts, but sometimes you just get a drag handle and can't be precise. You can put tables in a document as standalone frames, but you can't include them within your text story so they reflow properly. This is basic stuff for graphics and DTP software respectively, yet Affinity can't do them. But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.
  - frankzen 6y ago
    Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.

tomduncalf 6y ago

I’ve noticed a few companies seemingly pricing things higher than you’d think was sensible (the one that struck me recently is Contentful, who’s pricing tiers quickly jump up to “far too expensive for a small company”)... my assumption is they’ve made a decision that they are better served going after the customers who can pay more and leaving the rest to the competitors. I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more. But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again. I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!

f311a 6y ago
Affinity Designer is my best purchase this year. I don't need to use my graphics editor every single week or month, and it does not make any sense to pay Adobe on a subscription basis.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Affinity looks like the most promising replacement for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model. They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings. But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    >They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      It's mostly just dumb little things. You can transform elements using exact numerical values in some contexts, but sometimes you just get a drag handle and can't be precise. You can put tables in a document as standalone frames, but you can't include them within your text story so they reflow properly. This is basic stuff for graphics and DTP software respectively, yet Affinity can't do them. But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.
- frankzen 6y ago
  Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.