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I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I wa

I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects. And yet, I stayed on with Lightroom, thinking that so long as Adobe still had competition in that market, they'd keep it a one-off license. Then, one day, upon discovering some compatibility issues with the latest MacOS and the version of Lightroom I was using, I thought I'd check what the latest version of LR had to offer – and discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. It was painful researching and trialing alternatives, ultimately migrating my library over to Capture One, but it turned me so completely against Adobe that I've actively requested employers not assign me a Creative Cloud license (the tools fortunately only being tangential to my role).

thot_experiment 4y ago
I can't agree more. I still use an ancient version of photoshop/illustrator sometimes and lemme tell you, the difference in responsiveness is STARK. The problem is largely the entire concept of SaaS, but some stronger anti-trust anti-monopoly laws couldn't hurt either.
- slantedview 4y ago
  The laws are there but regulators are hesitant to enforce them.
patcon 4y ago
> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...
- c0mptonFP 4y ago
  > but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. Doesn't Figma have a free tier? That changes everything.
  - ifaxmycodetok8s 4y ago
    I use figma for personal projects and I've never forked out a dime.
  - killerdhmo 4y ago
    So do many adobe products, including XD; their Figma competitor
    - supertofu 4y ago
      XD was actually their Sketch competitor. What makes Figma remarkable is the ability to use it on the web. I wonder if Adobe will keep this aspect.
      - killerdhmo 4y ago
        Sketch... competes with Figma. They're UI/UX tools. What makes Figma great was their collaboration first element, which they will be keeping. Adobe was going down the web path as well https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/10/26/creative-cloud-canvas-spaces-ps-ai-in-browser https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/10/26/creative-cloud-...
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > free tier? That changes everything. Does it? To me, that just says "Locking my data in a platform that can suddenly decide to charge me for functionality."
    - c0mptonFP 4y ago
      Yup, better get rid of your GitHub account then as well
softfalcon 4y ago
I feel this in my very soul. Adobe used to be so cool and I loved the maturity and capability of their products. Then subscription subsistence reigned supreme and now I avoid Adobe products like the plague. Happily using DxO PhotoLab while I continue to avoid a Lightroom subscription.
GuB-42 4y ago
> their tools were unsurpassed Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here. I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.
- base698 4y ago
  I'm not a designer full time, but have dabbled over my career and in my youth used Photoshop and Premiere heavily. I'd say Pixelmator and Sketch were more approachable, discoverable and had better workflows. This made the combo of being easier to pick up than Adobe tools and more powerful for professionals. I was able to use Figma productively in my first day of using it. The added collaboration features with Figma's App preview mode and collaboration in the tool made me never look at anything else when I needed to design something.
- exmadscientist 4y ago
  Capture One and Lightroom are definitely fighting in the same class. Both are true pro-grade tools. Some people and some workflows will prefer one of the two, but that's how preferences work. It's basically Coke versus Pepsi.
  - IIsi50MHz 4y ago
    > Coke versus Pepsi So, in double-blind tests, most people prefer the 'Pepsi' analogue, but when they know or think they know which one is the 'Coke' analogue, the choose that one? . o O ( I don't really know which is the Pepsi and which is the Coke, in this matchup. )
    - lmm 4y ago
      When drinking a small sample cup people prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, when drinking a whole can people prefer Coke.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mekkie 4y ago
I can't believe I'm not the only one. Something similar happened to me with one of their iPad painting apps. They told me it would be completely free for artists. Went to save my files and put them on my computer for printing, only to learn they were locked within the adobe cloud cage of despair
anigbrowl 4y ago
I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago. Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry. That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians. Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it. I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.
- amatecha 4y ago
  CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).
  - qwertox 4y ago
    SoundForge was the better option, cracked, just like Microsoft used it, of course. That was in the Radium days. It went over to Sony and is now at Magix.
ortusdux 4y ago
I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers." Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
- oblio 4y ago
  Creatives also destroy companies. See NeXT or whatever the weird letter casing was.
  - hosh 4y ago
    Arguably, NeXT lives on in Apple.
    - mortenjorck 4y ago
      It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
      - behnamoh 4y ago
        Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
lenkite 4y ago
Kinda weird complaining about Adobe subscription pricing in a Figma thread when Figma also has the subscription pricing model.
- skyfalldev 4y ago
  Figma doesn't have Adobe's predatory cancellation fees AFAIK.
  - lenkite 4y ago
    What are these predatory cancellation fees ?
    - pandemicsyn 4y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qg1tyr/adobe_is_shady_company_canceling_a_free_trial_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qg1tyr/adobe...
    - softfalcon 4y ago
      Pray you never find out…
  - redler 4y ago
    Hold my beer. -- Adobe
ravenstine 4y ago
Autodesk has entered the chat. To be fair, Autodesk hasn't gone full spyware like Adobe. Otherwise, they're similarly poor stewards of industry "standard" software.
chillfox 4y ago
The Lightroom subscription is particularly painful because not only did Lightroom move to a subscription, they also “updated” it to a version with fewer features. I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.
justinclift 4y ago
> I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.
- softfalcon 4y ago
  I hope they go at each other like two big evil flaming titans in a massive battle that mortally wounds both of them. I sometimes sit and weigh out which one of them does more evil to stop innovation in the “digital creativity” space in the name of monopolistic greed. So far I think Adobe is winning because their products are more average consumer facing. But Autodesk sure seems to be racing to the bottom with its complete monopoly on 3D everything. Both are evil… I hate both of them.
rodgerd 4y ago
> In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, Only because they killed Freehand.
panta 4y ago
It seems that Capture One is on the same trajectory sadly.

thot_experiment 4y ago

I can't agree more. I still use an ancient version of photoshop/illustrator sometimes and lemme tell you, the difference in responsiveness is STARK. The problem is largely the entire concept of SaaS, but some stronger anti-trust anti-monopoly laws couldn't hurt either.

slantedview 4y ago
The laws are there but regulators are hesitant to enforce them.

patcon 4y ago

> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever. I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma? I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...

c0mptonFP 4y ago
> but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. Doesn't Figma have a free tier? That changes everything.
- ifaxmycodetok8s 4y ago
  I use figma for personal projects and I've never forked out a dime.
- killerdhmo 4y ago
  So do many adobe products, including XD; their Figma competitor
  - supertofu 4y ago
    XD was actually their Sketch competitor. What makes Figma remarkable is the ability to use it on the web. I wonder if Adobe will keep this aspect.
    - killerdhmo 4y ago
      Sketch... competes with Figma. They're UI/UX tools. What makes Figma great was their collaboration first element, which they will be keeping. Adobe was going down the web path as well https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/10/26/creative-cloud-canvas-spaces-ps-ai-in-browser https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2021/10/26/creative-cloud-...
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > free tier? That changes everything. Does it? To me, that just says "Locking my data in a platform that can suddenly decide to charge me for functionality."
  - c0mptonFP 4y ago
    Yup, better get rid of your GitHub account then as well

softfalcon 4y ago

I feel this in my very soul. Adobe used to be so cool and I loved the maturity and capability of their products. Then subscription subsistence reigned supreme and now I avoid Adobe products like the plague. Happily using DxO PhotoLab while I continue to avoid a Lightroom subscription.

GuB-42 4y ago

> their tools were unsurpassed Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here. I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.

base698 4y ago
I'm not a designer full time, but have dabbled over my career and in my youth used Photoshop and Premiere heavily. I'd say Pixelmator and Sketch were more approachable, discoverable and had better workflows. This made the combo of being easier to pick up than Adobe tools and more powerful for professionals. I was able to use Figma productively in my first day of using it. The added collaboration features with Figma's App preview mode and collaboration in the tool made me never look at anything else when I needed to design something.
exmadscientist 4y ago
Capture One and Lightroom are definitely fighting in the same class. Both are true pro-grade tools. Some people and some workflows will prefer one of the two, but that's how preferences work. It's basically Coke versus Pepsi.
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  > Coke versus Pepsi So, in double-blind tests, most people prefer the 'Pepsi' analogue, but when they know or think they know which one is the 'Coke' analogue, the choose that one? . o O ( I don't really know which is the Pepsi and which is the Coke, in this matchup. )
  - lmm 4y ago
    When drinking a small sample cup people prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi, when drinking a whole can people prefer Coke.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mekkie 4y ago

I can't believe I'm not the only one. Something similar happened to me with one of their iPad painting apps. They told me it would be completely free for artists. Went to save my files and put them on my computer for printing, only to learn they were locked within the adobe cloud cage of despair

anigbrowl 4y ago

I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago. Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry. That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians. Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it. I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.

amatecha 4y ago
CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).
- qwertox 4y ago
  SoundForge was the better option, cracked, just like Microsoft used it, of course. That was in the Radium days. It went over to Sony and is now at Magix.

ortusdux 4y ago

I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more: "It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers." Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.

oblio 4y ago
Creatives also destroy companies. See NeXT or whatever the weird letter casing was.
- hosh 4y ago
  Arguably, NeXT lives on in Apple.
  - mortenjorck 4y ago
    It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.

lenkite 4y ago

Kinda weird complaining about Adobe subscription pricing in a Figma thread when Figma also has the subscription pricing model.

skyfalldev 4y ago
Figma doesn't have Adobe's predatory cancellation fees AFAIK.
- lenkite 4y ago
  What are these predatory cancellation fees ?
  - pandemicsyn 4y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qg1tyr/adobe_is_shady_company_canceling_a_free_trial_for/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/qg1tyr/adobe...
  - softfalcon 4y ago
    Pray you never find out…
- redler 4y ago
  Hold my beer. -- Adobe

ravenstine 4y ago

Autodesk has entered the chat. To be fair, Autodesk hasn't gone full spyware like Adobe. Otherwise, they're similarly poor stewards of industry "standard" software.

chillfox 4y ago

The Lightroom subscription is particularly painful because not only did Lightroom move to a subscription, they also “updated” it to a version with fewer features. I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.

justinclift 4y ago

> I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.

softfalcon 4y ago
I hope they go at each other like two big evil flaming titans in a massive battle that mortally wounds both of them. I sometimes sit and weigh out which one of them does more evil to stop innovation in the “digital creativity” space in the name of monopolistic greed. So far I think Adobe is winning because their products are more average consumer facing. But Autodesk sure seems to be racing to the bottom with its complete monopoly on 3D everything. Both are evil… I hate both of them.

rodgerd 4y ago

> In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, Only because they killed Freehand.

panta 4y ago

It seems that Capture One is on the same trajectory sadly.