7 ms·

The increasing consolidation in the professional software market is concerning to say the least. I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring softw

The increasing consolidation in the professional software market is concerning to say the least. I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others. Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly on design and publishing tooling. Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite". Same with Autodesk and how they turned e.g Maya from one of the greatest software packages of all time into a bug-ridden shadow of its former self. Tools like Blender and KiCad really get my hopes high that we have a century of industry standard open source software with good UX ahead of us. I would be much more to e.g pay 50 bucks a month to blender foundation than being a hostage of Creative Cloud. I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did.

swalsh 5y ago
"Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite". There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.
- ilmiont 5y ago
  "If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market" It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/
  - wil421 5y ago
    Last year I used Darktable and Lightroom side by side. They were both steaming piles of crap. Lots of bugs, crashes, and extremely high CPU usages. Darktable was slightly less buggy on MacOS but not much. Lightroom was easier to figure out but I’m not really using anything but basic features on both apps.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      I do not remember Darktable ever crashing on me (well I am not professional and maybe not using all the features heavily). Also I use it less than a year, maybe older versions were less stable. I use it on Windows which can be a factor as well.
    - derwiki 5y ago
      What OSX LR bugs have you hit? Apart from it being slow sometimes, I cant think of a bug I've hit.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Similarly I used Darktable under OS X and didn't hit to any bugs. Exporting files require some patience since it maxes all cores at once, but nothing crashed or burned during the journey.
  - pizza234 5y ago
    I've tried to use Darktable as replacement, and there's no comparison in terms of UX and functionality (within the specific use case that Lightroom is intended for). I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      I personally use Darktable to process my raw photos for some time. While I didn't use Lightroom for any considerable amount of time, I've found that Darktable can process relatively modern raw files (A7III in my case) easily and with pretty high quality. What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far. For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
      - martyvis 5y ago
        Main thing I find Lightroom is superior compared to Darktable is being able apply adjustments consistently across groups of photos. You might have say 6 photos all taken of the same subject in the same conditions. You adjust one the way you want, and then literally copy and paste the categories of settings from one to all the other photos you want. Darktable doesn't seem to have that sort of workflow to get through hundreds of photos quickly.
        bayindirh 5y ago
        This is perfectly doable in Darktable too. You can either save the adjustments you want as a style or just copy the history stack and paste to other images. Just did the same thing last week.
      - p_j_w 5y ago
        I have a Canon point and shoot that I use for underwater photos and Darktable really doesn't cope well with some of the RAW files. I believe it's related to the zoom. I also vastly prefer Lightroom's overall workflow. That may be something that could be fixed with adjustment, though.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Darktable is not sufficient quality to be considered seriously as a LR replacement, sadly.
- liquidise 5y ago
  The Affinity software[1] has been excellent for my usecases. Their pricing is also incredible, with Photo and Designer each running $25 right now. Last week one of our employees said during a call that Photo their best software purchase in recent years. That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground. 1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
  - fgonzag 5y ago
    I second affinity. As someone who often resorted to pirated Photoshop because of it's very infrequent use, the first time I saw that affinity got all of the PS and Illustrator features I use for $50 combined I jumped on it. I couldn't be happier with my decision.
- starky 5y ago
  I've never used it but I believe Corel's version of Lightroom works on Linux. I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.
- sneak 5y ago
  Pixelmator is like $30 (once, not subscription) and is better than Photoshop. IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it. DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux. Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Is there a decent size community for Pixelmator? The difficulty with many of the open source or lesser known commercial products is that even if they're better than the big market leader, the amount of learning materials and community support is so much greater for the market leader.
    - novok 5y ago
      TBH The Affinity Triad (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is more popular than Pixelmator, more featured, does windows & mac and has a community. It's also a pay-once set of apps and is made by a medium size software company in the UK called Serif. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
prosofttw 5y ago
Throwaway for reasons The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths. This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  What do you mean? "Stadia" but for AutoCAD, Maya and Photoshop?
  - gen220 5y ago
    Not the OP, but this is already happening for the browser. See e.g. https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/ that was posted to HN not too long ago. It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer. Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/ I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.
jrodthree24 5y ago
I have no idea how anti-trust laws in the united states are supposed to work. Like why is Disney allowed to buy every studio? Why is Amazon allowed to buy like anything? Facebook also being allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp is crazy.
- judge2020 5y ago
  This is because it's just a sale of intellectual property (or physical property) from one company to the other - the U.S. prides itself on the individual liberty to do so, and because corporations are legal persons they're also allowed to do that. That's why, if the government or someone else thinks a certain sale is anticompetitive, you have to make a case that they shouldn't be allowed to exercise that liberty.
- bsiemon 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox As long as Disney doesn't 'harm' consumers they are allowed to consolidate. Harm is poorly defined in this case.
- basch 5y ago
  Buying the rights to old movies is quite a bit different than buying patents or businesses. In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different. Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?
  - HappySweeney 5y ago
    You can't really make Instagram these days. Well you can, but it won't have any users.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
Chazprime 5y ago
Don't forget Softimage XSI... losing that one still hurts.
qualudeheart 5y ago
This is why I’m optimistic about ai based software engineering tools. Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.
ksec 5y ago
>Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk.. Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again. https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888 https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888
- Flashtoo 5y ago
  > I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. That is a consequence of having a monopoly.
- 533474 5y ago
  If Apple cared about products they would strive for more competition to push them to create better products and not to cement their monopoly. During Jobs's leadership, yea, they innovated with amazing products but they also stepped up patent trolling, anti-competitive practices and hostile takeovers. Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15
  - anm89 5y ago
    Wait, are you telling me that Apple, an international legal business entity prioritizes money over the abstract value of competition? Why I never.
    - vkou 5y ago
      It's so incredibly obvious, yet it frequently needs to be spelled out.
- gtyras2mrs 5y ago
Lammy 5y ago
> I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others. I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys (Assuming you meant FreeHand instead of Pagemaker) At least Fireworks was an actual Macromedia creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
- halotrope 5y ago
  That is indeed surprising and ironic.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Golive (vs Dreamweaver), Photoshop (vs Fireworks) and even had its own Flash knock-off (LiveMotion). So way too much redundancy so that most Macromedia product rapidly went unmaintained, or abandoned when Adobe failed to milk them. But where Adobe completely dropped the ball, and where Macromedia strength was is community. Macromedia's product community was incredible. I also can't believe they had that many developers knowing Action Script to throw it all away, there are millions thing Flash could have done, like focus on game dev or desktop dev. It's just that Adobe wasn't willing to invest much in it at some point. Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping... Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.
bsder 5y ago
> I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did. Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe. They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month. We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD. We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).
emh68 5y ago
The consolidation is an illusion caused by not seeking out and/or encountering new competitors. Once there was Adobe plus some small-time company you were fond of. Then Adobe bought that small company. So now you think that only Adobe remains. Guess what? Some other company has taken up the slack, filling the niche left behind by that other small-time company. You just have to go find it.

swalsh 5y ago

"Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite". There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.

ilmiont 5y ago
"If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market" It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/ https://www.darktable.org/
- wil421 5y ago
  Last year I used Darktable and Lightroom side by side. They were both steaming piles of crap. Lots of bugs, crashes, and extremely high CPU usages. Darktable was slightly less buggy on MacOS but not much. Lightroom was easier to figure out but I’m not really using anything but basic features on both apps.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    I do not remember Darktable ever crashing on me (well I am not professional and maybe not using all the features heavily). Also I use it less than a year, maybe older versions were less stable. I use it on Windows which can be a factor as well.
  - derwiki 5y ago
    What OSX LR bugs have you hit? Apart from it being slow sometimes, I cant think of a bug I've hit.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Similarly I used Darktable under OS X and didn't hit to any bugs. Exporting files require some patience since it maxes all cores at once, but nothing crashed or burned during the journey.
- pizza234 5y ago
  I've tried to use Darktable as replacement, and there's no comparison in terms of UX and functionality (within the specific use case that Lightroom is intended for). I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I personally use Darktable to process my raw photos for some time. While I didn't use Lightroom for any considerable amount of time, I've found that Darktable can process relatively modern raw files (A7III in my case) easily and with pretty high quality. What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far. For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.
    - martyvis 5y ago
      Main thing I find Lightroom is superior compared to Darktable is being able apply adjustments consistently across groups of photos. You might have say 6 photos all taken of the same subject in the same conditions. You adjust one the way you want, and then literally copy and paste the categories of settings from one to all the other photos you want. Darktable doesn't seem to have that sort of workflow to get through hundreds of photos quickly.
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        This is perfectly doable in Darktable too. You can either save the adjustments you want as a style or just copy the history stack and paste to other images. Just did the same thing last week.
    - p_j_w 5y ago
      I have a Canon point and shoot that I use for underwater photos and Darktable really doesn't cope well with some of the RAW files. I believe it's related to the zoom. I also vastly prefer Lightroom's overall workflow. That may be something that could be fixed with adjustment, though.
- sneak 5y ago
  Darktable is not sufficient quality to be considered seriously as a LR replacement, sadly.
liquidise 5y ago
The Affinity software[1] has been excellent for my usecases. Their pricing is also incredible, with Photo and Designer each running $25 right now. Last week one of our employees said during a call that Photo their best software purchase in recent years. That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground. 1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
- fgonzag 5y ago
  I second affinity. As someone who often resorted to pirated Photoshop because of it's very infrequent use, the first time I saw that affinity got all of the PS and Illustrator features I use for $50 combined I jumped on it. I couldn't be happier with my decision.
starky 5y ago
I've never used it but I believe Corel's version of Lightroom works on Linux. I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.
sneak 5y ago
Pixelmator is like $30 (once, not subscription) and is better than Photoshop. IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it. DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux. Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Is there a decent size community for Pixelmator? The difficulty with many of the open source or lesser known commercial products is that even if they're better than the big market leader, the amount of learning materials and community support is so much greater for the market leader.
  - novok 5y ago
    TBH The Affinity Triad (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is more popular than Pixelmator, more featured, does windows & mac and has a community. It's also a pay-once set of apps and is made by a medium size software company in the UK called Serif. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

prosofttw 5y ago

Throwaway for reasons The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths. This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.

throw_m239339 5y ago
What do you mean? "Stadia" but for AutoCAD, Maya and Photoshop?
- gen220 5y ago
  Not the OP, but this is already happening for the browser. See e.g. https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/ that was posted to HN not too long ago. It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer. Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/ I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.

jrodthree24 5y ago

I have no idea how anti-trust laws in the united states are supposed to work. Like why is Disney allowed to buy every studio? Why is Amazon allowed to buy like anything? Facebook also being allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp is crazy.

judge2020 5y ago
This is because it's just a sale of intellectual property (or physical property) from one company to the other - the U.S. prides itself on the individual liberty to do so, and because corporations are legal persons they're also allowed to do that. That's why, if the government or someone else thinks a certain sale is anticompetitive, you have to make a case that they shouldn't be allowed to exercise that liberty.
bsiemon 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox As long as Disney doesn't 'harm' consumers they are allowed to consolidate. Harm is poorly defined in this case.
basch 5y ago
Buying the rights to old movies is quite a bit different than buying patents or businesses. In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different. Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?
- HappySweeney 5y ago
  You can't really make Instagram these days. Well you can, but it won't have any users.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago

Chazprime 5y ago

Don't forget Softimage XSI... losing that one still hurts.

qualudeheart 5y ago

This is why I’m optimistic about ai based software engineering tools. Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.

ksec 5y ago

>Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk.. Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again. https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888 https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888

Flashtoo 5y ago
> I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. That is a consequence of having a monopoly.
533474 5y ago
If Apple cared about products they would strive for more competition to push them to create better products and not to cement their monopoly. During Jobs's leadership, yea, they innovated with amazing products but they also stepped up patent trolling, anti-competitive practices and hostile takeovers. Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15
- anm89 5y ago
  Wait, are you telling me that Apple, an international legal business entity prioritizes money over the abstract value of competition? Why I never.
  - vkou 5y ago
    It's so incredibly obvious, yet it frequently needs to be spelled out.
gtyras2mrs 5y ago

Lammy 5y ago

> I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others. I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys (Assuming you meant FreeHand instead of Pagemaker) At least Fireworks was an actual Macromedia creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks

halotrope 5y ago
That is indeed surprising and ironic.
throw_m239339 5y ago
Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Golive (vs Dreamweaver), Photoshop (vs Fireworks) and even had its own Flash knock-off (LiveMotion). So way too much redundancy so that most Macromedia product rapidly went unmaintained, or abandoned when Adobe failed to milk them. But where Adobe completely dropped the ball, and where Macromedia strength was is community. Macromedia's product community was incredible. I also can't believe they had that many developers knowing Action Script to throw it all away, there are millions thing Flash could have done, like focus on game dev or desktop dev. It's just that Adobe wasn't willing to invest much in it at some point. Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping... Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.

bsder 5y ago

> I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did. Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe. They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month. We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD. We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).

emh68 5y ago

The consolidation is an illusion caused by not seeking out and/or encountering new competitors. Once there was Adobe plus some small-time company you were fond of. Then Adobe bought that small company. So now you think that only Adobe remains. Guess what? Some other company has taken up the slack, filling the niche left behind by that other small-time company. You just have to go find it.