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Adobe at 40
- kachinga123 4y agonice article!
- tjscott 4y agoI couldn’t see the article past the full screen autoplay video, so I’ll have to take your word that there was any relevant content in that page.
- Mistletoe 4y agoI don’t think my opinion of Adobe could be lower than now and I wonder what the founders 40 years ago would think of the current version of Adobe. Their “subscriptions out the wazoo” model is cancerous. I remember I had an Adobe Photoshop (can’t remember the version) disc and it meant the program was mine to use forever. Our transaction was done when I bought it and it did pretty much everything I needed Photoshop to do.
- acchow 4y agoWith a forever license, the incentive is a bit too weak for continual security patches.
- selcuka 4y agoIt's not like everyone buys it on the same day, and never buys anything else from them. If they don't fix security issues new customers will refuse to buy the product. Besides in the old days you could still buy a "maintenance" agreement for your product, which entitled you to x months of upgrades. You would still own the licence, though.
- bitwize 4y agoAs Khaled Mardam-Bey recently discovered.
- chillfox 4y agoI don't need security fixes for Lightroom or Photoshop... Like my camera is not going to start hiding viruses in photos all of a sudden.
- redditor98654 4y agoIt has less to do with your camera injecting viruses. There are other attack surfaces. For instance someone could send you a malicious Jpeg and if your Adobe application has a vulnerability and you decide to open that file, it could be exploited.
- chillfox 4y agoSure, but I don’t use photoshop or Lightroom for images I didn’t create.
- mandmandam 4y agoIt's awful. I'm glad that there are up and coming alternatives Adobe haven't bought and ruined yet though. Affinity are doing some great stuff, can't praise them enough. There's the odd tiny thing I'd miss Adobe for, but between their prices, their business practices, and the invasive software there's really no comparison any more.
- nugget 4y agoAdobe employs more dark patterns in their rebill/subscription products than any other established company I've dealt with. I go out of my way to avoid them now. It doesn't surprise me that they had to pay such a premium for Figma.
- Mistletoe 4y agohttps://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.adobe.com https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.adobe.com They've earned these 1.2 stars.
- nocman 4y agoNo. They have not. They deserve 0 stars. I am sure there is some truly 1.2 star company out there with better customer service and company policies.
- yandrypozo 4y agoI think Oracle is holding a beer to Adobe :)
- user3939382 4y agoI hate them and yet I pay for it because I have 20 years of sunk cost in learning Photoshop and Illustrator. I execute very complex editing in those apps as a reflex/on autopilot. I'm sure it's the same for many others.
- NegativeLatency 4y agoI’m very much less experienced but have really enjoyed the Affinity apps, especially the illustrator replacement.
- andirk 4y agoAs much as I loathe subscription models for things like this, I turn my sub on and off as needed. That Photoshop + bundle CD cost me $1200 in 2008. Now I pay $20/mo which = 5 years until I reach that CD cost. It's not usually my profession, so most months I don't use it. I miss that CD. I told Adobe (in my head) that I'm stealing their software until I can afford to pay for it. Then I could, so I did.
- the_bear 4y agoFrom what I'm seeing, Photoshop only costs $20/month (actually $20.99) if you commit to an annual plan. It's $31.49/month if you want month-to-month. And in the past, every time I've wanted to cancel a subscription, I've had to spend ~30 minutes with their support. How are you able to turn it on and off so easily? I'd love to figure out a way to avoid their normal cancelation flow.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI had an annual plan last year that was 50% off for new users (easy, use a new email) and I canceled it online this year, no problem. I had a 12 month commitment but just set a reminder to cancel in month 11. No problem. This was better than past experiences. (I also get CC from work which negated me needing another subscription.)
- aikinai 4y agoIsn’t the Photo plan that includes Photoshop only $10?
- kennedywm 4y agoYes. Though it's easy to miss.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chx 4y agoThat of course is true as a user but do you realize Adobe never had a negative quarter?
- yandrypozo 4y agoSame feeling, I really hope Adobe is disrupted and destroyed soon
- cokeandpepsi 4y agoIf anything machine learning researchers will finally acchive something worthwhile by killing the company off
- yandrypozo 4y agoAmen! waiting for that day to come
- bitwize 4y agoAdobe software could literally poke you through the eyeball every time you use it and people will still go "What am I going to use instead? GIMP can't hold a candle to Photoshop." Though I actually got my sister hooked on Krita as a Windows tablet replacement for ProCreate.
- ramblin_prose 4y agoI literally had to tell their customer support I had cancer to get them to cancel my sub. Will never get them another cent.
- thundergolfer 4y agoWow, that’s a lot. I didn’t do that, but I did get very angry in a chat to convince them to partially refund subscription costs I believed were cheated out of my pocket. I paid a stupid amount for a subscription I never used because Abode has annoyingly effective dark patterns in their trial/cancellation flow.
- bigbaguette 4y ago-Hi Adobe, I'd like to cancel my Creative Cloud subscription -Ohhh we're sorry to see you leave. Would you like three extra months for free so that we can maybe change your mind? -Okay, sure -three months later: Hi Adobe, I'd like to cancel my Creative Cloud subscription -Dear valued customer. If you want to cancel your subscription, please pay for 9 months of service since the offer you accepted three months ago signed you up for another full year. Go to hell, Adobe.
- MengerSponge 4y agoNot surprising that the makers of InDesign would be a fine print company.
- yieldcrv 4y agoJokes on them, the only reason i wanted to cancel was to switch to a student discount since i enrolled in some continuing education at a college and got an edu email But instead they offered me those 3 months for free which lasted the whole semester and then I got the student discount after Did not get trapped into that year long thing
- whoopdedo 4y agoFunny there's no mention of Flash.
- erk__ 4y agoWell Flash was developed by Macromedia, which was then later bought by Adobe so I don't think it is as relevant for Adobes early days as some of the other things.
- ihatepython 4y agoMacromedia actually acquired Flash as well, the original program was FutureSplash which was bought and re-branded by Macromedia, but this was a very early version
- mistrial9 4y ago"if you ever cancel my paid-for Illustrator bundle from ten years ago, that I use on a stable OSX 10.4, I will hand out t-shirts in front of your SF building for months on end, declaring every bit of the way I was treated" -- signed a previously happy Adobe customer from the 90s
- kccqzy 4y agoFunnily enough the Adobe building in SF isn't where they have their Creative Cloud division. It's where they have their Experience Cloud division (aka ads). The Creative Cloud division is still mostly in San Jose.
- tristan957 4y agoThat isn't 100% true at least. My friend worked in their SF office on Adobe XD.
- acdha 4y agoI'm reminded of the time I tried Lightroom around the time Apple announced that Aperture was being discontinued. It was unusably slow on the laptop I was using at the time — which was impressive given that Aperture had been perfectly usable — and I had to spend 20 minutes telling their support rep that I wasn't going to buy a new computer just to run Creative Cloud. Photoshop was a great tool but they've spent years burning the boats moving away from the “bicycle for the mind”-era feeling which got them fans 20+ years ago.
- azinman2 4y agoI’m still sad about the loss of Aperture
- chillfox 4y agoIt was the one app I used Mac for, with it gone there was no reason to stick with Mac.
- ace2358 4y agoNever fear! You can still run it and a few other apps: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive “ Run Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes on macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, and macOS Catalina. Xcode 11.7 on macOS Mojave. Final Cut Pro 7, Logic Pro 9, and iWork ’09 on macOS Mojave or macOS High Sierra.”
- jmann99999 4y agoThis thread reminded me of three things. 1. I have always been afraid to cancel my Adobe subscription that gets me Photoshop 2. I bought the Affinity Suite months ago 3. Why not cancel my Adobe subscription, burn the ships, and give Affinity a REAL try. I can always go back.
- uptown 4y agoJust did that. I still like PS better and I haven’t found a good alternative for LR. I may go back - but I’m giving it a try.
- rodgerd 4y agoSame problem for me. Photoshop? Don't care, plenty of options. Lightroom? Nothing's really an adequate replacement, not least because most of the tools touted as replacements are a lot more concerned about the "digital darkroom" fucking-around-with-RAW-settings aspect that the asset management side of things.
- yakubin 4y agoFor digital asset management I use ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac. I’m pretty satisfied.
- darkteflon 4y agoIs ACDSee Photo Studio a good bet for managing metadata on video assets too, do you happen to know? I’ve been looking for a good asset manager to complement my FCPX workflow for ages, seems like a largely abandoned space on Mac.
- yakubin 4y agoI don’t know. I don’t do any video.
- uptown 4y ago
- dhosek 4y agoIt’s kind of interesting to note that Adobe predates the Mac. An interesting bit of Adobe pre-history was that Donald Knuth used a pre-release version of PhotoShop at Adobe headquarters when he was putting together his book 3:16. He had it running on multiple Macs each processing a different scanned calligraphic rendering of a verse because the size of the image files was such that processing was painfully slow. One interesting bit was on one of the scans, he changed a line break to more accurately reflect the sense of the text that was rendered. After the first edition went to press, he discovered that the calligrapher had rendered a Russian cross in the negative space¹ and his modification had obliterated this. Later editions made some other changes to line breaks to restore the Russian cross. ⸻ 1. This account is from my potentially inaccurate recollection of Knuth’s talk at the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco. It might have been a cross of Lorraine and it might have been the words that formed the cross and not the negative space.
- levymetal 4y agoOne of my favourite things they’ve done recently is remove support for TOTP. Now, if you want 2FA, you have to download their proprietary Adobe Account Security app. This in turn requires you to provide a phone number, because unlike TOTP there’s no alternative method of backup. I really do wonder why they removed an easy-to-use, known, secure, and trusted standard in favour of a clunky app that’s ultimately only as secure as a phone number (in reality less so as DIY security always results in holes). More vendor lock-in? Another avenue to harvest data? Not that it really affects me as I no longer use any Adobe products.
- mrjin 4y agoThe answer is plain and simple: they want your phone number, your account security is not much of their concern.
- cpv 4y agoI wonder if any Adobe users have tried some other options for some programs (Gimp, Inkscape, Krita), and if suits their needs.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoGIMP is a non-starter, no CMYK, no Adjustment Layers.
- rawTruthHurts 4y agoI've tried Inkscape and GIMP. I'm sure they must be great pieces of software, but their usability is so awful it renders them useless for me. And they're not great options if your client provides/asks for adobe proprietary files (psds, ais...)
- mrjin 4y agoAdobe is the most malicious company I've ever dealt with. My wife needed to use PS & LR in a couple of occasion and I checked the monthly subscription it looked only around $20/m or something and did not realize it was actually an ANNUAL COMMITMENT with a monthly price tag. Note that I checked everywhere but I still did not find out the fact. At this stage it might be me to blame. And soon I completely forgot about it. Then just a couple of days over a year, I noticed that there were payments to Adobe on my credit card statement. So I asked my wife was she still using it and she said, ahhhh, nope, I finished with it just after couple of days. Okay, so we paid Adobe 11 months for nothing. Thus I contacted Adobe to cancel the subscription and got told please pay us another 11 months as you did not cancel before the last day of the year... What?! I challenged that and the support actually help to cancel without incurring additional charges to my card. I thought that was the end of the story. But when I tried to uninstall it, the installer asked me to login. Entered my credentials, did not work. Double checked by trying to login to the website, the credentials were actually correct. Googled and found their dedicated clean up tool to do it, which did not work neither. Eventually had to manually remove the master installation info from registry and use the other tools to remove their bloated packages one by one. I thought I had clean up all their sh*t but after reboot there was still a couple of services running even after deleting the installation folder. The only thing as hard to remove was a virus.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoJust gonna say it a better world would be one where they didn’t make it to 50. Garbage company. Garbage products. Will never forgive Figma for burning the one chance this decade we had to dethrone them.
- omar_alt 4y agoI’m just thankful the closest I got to Adobe was installing Acrobat reader on a PC when I was a humanities student. After switching to software development I have never had to use Creative Suite or Creative Cloud.
- trinsic2 4y agoI'll never use proprietary software like Adobe in my work flow ever again. I recently switched from Windows to Linux[1] for the same reasons and will never go back. Many of these companies are hostile to there custom base, no reason to support them. I have moved on to supporting development teams behind Inkscape, Mozilla and Obsidian. People behind these projects seem like they care about where the future of software is heading. [1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transition-windows-to-linux/ https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...
- drkhn1234 4y ago
- FractalHQ 4y agoAdobe, please allow me stop your spyware from automatically spinning up a dozen processes every time my computer starts even when I don’t plan on opening one of your astonishingly terrible applications. Thanks!
- jason_slack 4y agoFor those interested there is a book about the "Early Days" at Adobe. https://archive.org/details/insidepublishing00pfif https://archive.org/details/insidepublishing00pfif https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Publishing-Revolution-Adobe-Story/dp/0321115643/ref=sr_1_3?crid=94276MZH2A82&keywords=the+adobe+story&qid=1670344661&sprefix=the+adobe+story%2Caps%2C82&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Publishing-Revolution-Adobe-St...