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I understand your frustration in what Adobe is doing, but your post is just flat out wrong. Your projecting this annoyance onto everyone and this product too.

I understand your frustration in what Adobe is doing, but your post is just flat out wrong. Your projecting this annoyance onto everyone and this product too. ‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too. I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues. A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.

mistrial9 5y ago
as someone from the 90s desktop publishing scene myself, I would say that the parent post is accurate from the seat of a person faced with the transition to cloud. 26 million subscribers and growing, reflects network power, ease of acquisition of new customers, institutional users, and just basically people on the further edges of the original "boom". Just because the current model does build and grow subscriptions per month, at those prices, under those terms, does not mean that the observations from the seat of an individual person, is wrong or invalid. "After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Enterprise / consumer split perspective. Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers. A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option. So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad. So yes, both.
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    I have used Adobe CC under a few companies. It has a bad habit of not allowing you to login, either producing a white screen or looping back to the login prompt. The only resolution has been to fully uninstall and reinstall it. Very frustrating. Extremely hard to deploy via management tools.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I should have caveated that: web-based SaaS. Adobe's installers have always felt like Microsoft-levels of legacy preservation ("We'll just wrap +1 layer over top, and avoid changing anything underneath") without Microsoft-levels of technical architecture talent.
rancar2 5y ago
Feedback to the ChildOfChaos: There were a lot of points made by the OP, which were not flat out wrong, and as you noted, are more nuanced than the OP expressed. For instance, on Macs, this is true with default settings “CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU,” where one has to hunt and kill Abode’s processes manually to get things under control. As for XD specifically, it was an inferior product to Sketch when it was launched, which slowed its adoption in addition to the subscription pricing (note that this is a US market-centric point of view and opinion). However, overtime XD improved (aside Figma did too), and individuals heavily invested in the CC integrations started getting enough from CC/XD to use it. The OP is likely giving a point and time opinion (at roll out), and some of the original issues presented as black-and-white are much more of shades of gray, especially when considering how things have changed with time.
irrational 5y ago
What percentage are business users? My company pays for a license to creative cloud for me. But for personal use it is too expensive, so I use Affinity suite. If students use something cheaper like Affinity suite and many professionals use affinity suite for their personal use, there may come a time where businesses realize that they don’t actually have to pay out for creative cloud.
- o_____________o 5y ago
  Let’s not forget that Photoshop has always been expensive and became the de facto photo editor because they were so far ahead of everyone when piracy was rampant. That’s the only way most people were Photoshop literate by the time they entered the job market. This was discussed frequently inside Abobe, but the solutions always flowed back to more control instead of more openness. Now Adobe is going to push tech exoticism while suites like Affinity eat up the market.
  - kyriakos 5y ago
    To this day pirating adobe's stuff is straight forward. They don't seem to be trying really hard to sto piracy probably because they know their money comes from enterprise. To put things in perspective the same crack has been working for releases from the last 2 years. If they really wanted to keep piracy at bay they could have made the lives of people who don't pay harder.
fxtentacle 5y ago
You can both be present physically and absent with your mind. Yes, their cloud subscription is growing in numbers. And my company pays for a subscription for me, so I'm 1 additional user and $200 (or whatever) in additional monthly revenue. But we are only subscribers because they are holding our data hostage with their proprietary file format. As soon as any app with good enough Photoshop PSD and Adobe Illustrator AI import comes around, we'll jump ship. With that in mind, the fact that XD would lock us into yet another proprietary file format from Adobe is a death blow. We decided not to use it before even evaluating it, because it would increase our vendor lock-in. That's why I said in my original comment: "XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use". If XD files become worthless without an Adobe subscription, then we're not interested in producing them. So technically you are correct that we're still a paying customer so we technically haven't left yet. But our mind and our loyalty is long gone. That's what I tried to say. People like my company do not wish to continue being a customer. Accordingly, they don't care about new products. "you just wanted to moan about the subscription". No, I see this as a strategy mistake. Photoshop became popular because it was so easy for everyone to get a cheap old copy and start using it. Now that Adobe has locked out most of the hobbyists, where is the next generation of experts going to come from? Who is going to pay $600 annually just to practice with Adobe XD instead of using a free competitor? I'd say you can see the same with 3ds max, which once was the undoubted king of 3d content creation software. By now, all the young people use Blender. It's free and almost as good. I predict in 10 years 3ds max will be obsolete and Blender will become the new standard.

mistrial9 5y ago

as someone from the 90s desktop publishing scene myself, I would say that the parent post is accurate from the seat of a person faced with the transition to cloud. 26 million subscribers and growing, reflects network power, ease of acquisition of new customers, institutional users, and just basically people on the further edges of the original "boom". Just because the current model does build and grow subscriptions per month, at those prices, under those terms, does not mean that the observations from the seat of an individual person, is wrong or invalid. "After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.

ethbr0 5y ago
Enterprise / consumer split perspective. Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers. A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option. So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad. So yes, both.
- chris_wot 5y ago
  I have used Adobe CC under a few companies. It has a bad habit of not allowing you to login, either producing a white screen or looping back to the login prompt. The only resolution has been to fully uninstall and reinstall it. Very frustrating. Extremely hard to deploy via management tools.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    I should have caveated that: web-based SaaS. Adobe's installers have always felt like Microsoft-levels of legacy preservation ("We'll just wrap +1 layer over top, and avoid changing anything underneath") without Microsoft-levels of technical architecture talent.

rancar2 5y ago

Feedback to the ChildOfChaos: There were a lot of points made by the OP, which were not flat out wrong, and as you noted, are more nuanced than the OP expressed. For instance, on Macs, this is true with default settings “CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU,” where one has to hunt and kill Abode’s processes manually to get things under control. As for XD specifically, it was an inferior product to Sketch when it was launched, which slowed its adoption in addition to the subscription pricing (note that this is a US market-centric point of view and opinion). However, overtime XD improved (aside Figma did too), and individuals heavily invested in the CC integrations started getting enough from CC/XD to use it. The OP is likely giving a point and time opinion (at roll out), and some of the original issues presented as black-and-white are much more of shades of gray, especially when considering how things have changed with time.

irrational 5y ago

What percentage are business users? My company pays for a license to creative cloud for me. But for personal use it is too expensive, so I use Affinity suite. If students use something cheaper like Affinity suite and many professionals use affinity suite for their personal use, there may come a time where businesses realize that they don’t actually have to pay out for creative cloud.

o_____________o 5y ago
Let’s not forget that Photoshop has always been expensive and became the de facto photo editor because they were so far ahead of everyone when piracy was rampant. That’s the only way most people were Photoshop literate by the time they entered the job market. This was discussed frequently inside Abobe, but the solutions always flowed back to more control instead of more openness. Now Adobe is going to push tech exoticism while suites like Affinity eat up the market.
- kyriakos 5y ago
  To this day pirating adobe's stuff is straight forward. They don't seem to be trying really hard to sto piracy probably because they know their money comes from enterprise. To put things in perspective the same crack has been working for releases from the last 2 years. If they really wanted to keep piracy at bay they could have made the lives of people who don't pay harder.

fxtentacle 5y ago

You can both be present physically and absent with your mind. Yes, their cloud subscription is growing in numbers. And my company pays for a subscription for me, so I'm 1 additional user and $200 (or whatever) in additional monthly revenue. But we are only subscribers because they are holding our data hostage with their proprietary file format. As soon as any app with good enough Photoshop PSD and Adobe Illustrator AI import comes around, we'll jump ship. With that in mind, the fact that XD would lock us into yet another proprietary file format from Adobe is a death blow. We decided not to use it before even evaluating it, because it would increase our vendor lock-in. That's why I said in my original comment: "XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use". If XD files become worthless without an Adobe subscription, then we're not interested in producing them. So technically you are correct that we're still a paying customer so we technically haven't left yet. But our mind and our loyalty is long gone. That's what I tried to say. People like my company do not wish to continue being a customer. Accordingly, they don't care about new products. "you just wanted to moan about the subscription". No, I see this as a strategy mistake. Photoshop became popular because it was so easy for everyone to get a cheap old copy and start using it. Now that Adobe has locked out most of the hobbyists, where is the next generation of experts going to come from? Who is going to pay $600 annually just to practice with Adobe XD instead of using a free competitor? I'd say you can see the same with 3ds max, which once was the undoubted king of 3d content creation software. By now, all the young people use Blender. It's free and almost as good. I predict in 10 years 3ds max will be obsolete and Blender will become the new standard.