4 ms·

Are you suggesting people build alternatives to the Adobe suite? That's not something a startup can just do, there are alternatives that have been around for 5+

Are you suggesting people build alternatives to the Adobe suite? That's not something a startup can just do, there are alternatives that have been around for 5+ years and do not come close to the power of the Adobe suite, for anyone to compete they'll need to be better than all the current free alternatives which isn't something someone can do with 6 months of work. There is definitely room for someone to compete with Adobe, but whether anyone ever can is what matters, there's a reason Photoshop is so widely used when there are free alternatives.

ssp 15y ago
Is there an identifiable set of users who use only a subset of what Creative Suite provides? If so, supporting that subset better than CS could be a possibility.
- reneherse 15y ago
  There are probably several identifiable subsets of users who make use of different parts of the Suite. Ostensibly, the idea of the CS was that you could mix and match just the pieces that suit the work flow of your discipline, whether that's photo finishing, graphic design, interactive design, or what have you. The reality is that this is one of the reasons Adobe's products are bloated, difficult to learn, and not truly integrated or consistent in their UI.
shuzchen 15y ago
I think it can still be done. Corel's options for vector and photo editors still get business, and quark express competed with indesign for a long time (assuming the reason it died was because they failed to keep innovating, not because indesign's position is insurmountable). There are yet tons of video editing software options to compete with Premiere. When I look at the free/open source solutions (gimp, scribus, inkscape), what I see are tools made by engineers. I think if you injected in a good measure of input from designers and usability experts it'd go a long way towards being solid competition.
- jonah 15y ago
  QuarkXPress existed WAAAY before InDesign came out. It was the 800 pound gorilla in the publishing world for many years. InDesign was the insurgent and KILLED Quark in short order - primarily because Quark had become such a legacy piece of junk and couldn't keep up with the times or the much more modern InDesign.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Before InDesign killed Quark, Quark killed PageMaker. Going on how long it's been, i think InDesign is due for a killing by now.
  - bonaldi 15y ago
    tldr: It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't, because they were milking their cash cow hard and wilfully ignoring the future. Quark committed suicide: they outsourced virtually all of their R&D, leaving none of the people who had built the previous versions employed. They ignored their users, assuming they were captive, for more than a decade. They also ignored the move to OS X for literally years, leaving (mainly Mac-based) users to choose between staying on OS 9 and moving to Windows and buying all new hardware. Adobe came along at just the right moment with InDesign -- ran on OS X, best-of-class print tools -- and you could almost hear the stampede. A real pity, too, as InDesign has a horrorshow UI, while XPress's "make boxes, put things in them" metaphor is exactly how DTP should be done.
    - jonah 15y ago
      > It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't. e.g. Microsoft, MySpace, etc. etc. I'd argue didn't and couldn't are essentially one-and-the-same.
- galfarragem 15y ago
  Adobe software is just too powerful to be replaced. It's like Autodesk. You can do almost everything there. This flexibility (and still competing with/being the most powerful tool in that niche) makes it almost impossible to defeat. Of course adobe is not perfect (very far from that) but their software is being developed for several years, is not something a startup makes in some months. Of course is possible, look at the example of Sketchup, there was dozens of great 3d modeling tools and they gained a good market position innovating where others grasp: usability for newbies. But they had to be great on this, good usability wouldn´t be enough..
adrianhoward 15y ago
You don't have to replace all of Adobe CS to compete with Adobe CS. Not many of the folk I know with CS actually use the vast majority of it. For example I do almost no print work. All the stuff Adobe sweat over for the print folk - doesn't impact me in the slightest. In fact it gets in the way of the stuff I need to do since it adds complexity to the UI. In the Mac land a bunch of folk are switching to paid tools like Pixelmator and Acorn as alternatives to Photoshop for some work. They don't replace everything that PS dues, but offer what a subset of the PS audience needs for a substantially cheaper price with some arguably better functionality in a few places. I know people who have CS and Pixelmator, and spend most of their time in the latter and just bring up CS when they need something "clever". Both Pixelmator and Acorn seem to be doing very well for themselves - and I think both are still single developer shops. What nobody apart from Adobe seems to be really doing is the "suite" part - managing the integration well. For example - I would part with $200 in a heartbeat for a micro-suite that handled bitmap and vector work together to the same level that Pixelmator managed bitmap stuff, with some nice glue/plugins to support where I work (web apps, mobile apps, pushing out multiple resolution versions, etc.).
- Someone 15y ago
  Not as nice as true integration, but in OmniGraffle you can link to an external file for the image in an object instead of copying it into the document. Better yet, when OmniGraffle receives focus, it notices when such external files change, and updates the document (I use 4.2.3 of OmniGraffle Pro, which is old, so this feature may have been improved and/or removed) The latest version of OmniGraffle has Bezier curves, but I haven't used them, so I do not know whether they are any good, but I would guess that they may be lacking for the cases where you want to do more artistic drawing. It is more a diagramming tool than a drawing tool.
  - adrianhoward 15y ago
    I like OmniGraffle - just upgraded it in fact - but it's a very different kind of product from Illustrator :)
pg 15y ago
(Incidentally, an idea with these types of objections to it tends to be a good startup idea.)

ssp 15y ago

Is there an identifiable set of users who use only a subset of what Creative Suite provides? If so, supporting that subset better than CS could be a possibility.

reneherse 15y ago
There are probably several identifiable subsets of users who make use of different parts of the Suite. Ostensibly, the idea of the CS was that you could mix and match just the pieces that suit the work flow of your discipline, whether that's photo finishing, graphic design, interactive design, or what have you. The reality is that this is one of the reasons Adobe's products are bloated, difficult to learn, and not truly integrated or consistent in their UI.

shuzchen 15y ago

I think it can still be done. Corel's options for vector and photo editors still get business, and quark express competed with indesign for a long time (assuming the reason it died was because they failed to keep innovating, not because indesign's position is insurmountable). There are yet tons of video editing software options to compete with Premiere. When I look at the free/open source solutions (gimp, scribus, inkscape), what I see are tools made by engineers. I think if you injected in a good measure of input from designers and usability experts it'd go a long way towards being solid competition.

jonah 15y ago
QuarkXPress existed WAAAY before InDesign came out. It was the 800 pound gorilla in the publishing world for many years. InDesign was the insurgent and KILLED Quark in short order - primarily because Quark had become such a legacy piece of junk and couldn't keep up with the times or the much more modern InDesign.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Before InDesign killed Quark, Quark killed PageMaker. Going on how long it's been, i think InDesign is due for a killing by now.
- bonaldi 15y ago
  tldr: It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't, because they were milking their cash cow hard and wilfully ignoring the future. Quark committed suicide: they outsourced virtually all of their R&D, leaving none of the people who had built the previous versions employed. They ignored their users, assuming they were captive, for more than a decade. They also ignored the move to OS X for literally years, leaving (mainly Mac-based) users to choose between staying on OS 9 and moving to Windows and buying all new hardware. Adobe came along at just the right moment with InDesign -- ran on OS X, best-of-class print tools -- and you could almost hear the stampede. A real pity, too, as InDesign has a horrorshow UI, while XPress's "make boxes, put things in them" metaphor is exactly how DTP should be done.
  - jonah 15y ago
    > It wasn't that they couldn't keep up with the times, it's that they didn't. e.g. Microsoft, MySpace, etc. etc. I'd argue didn't and couldn't are essentially one-and-the-same.
galfarragem 15y ago
Adobe software is just too powerful to be replaced. It's like Autodesk. You can do almost everything there. This flexibility (and still competing with/being the most powerful tool in that niche) makes it almost impossible to defeat. Of course adobe is not perfect (very far from that) but their software is being developed for several years, is not something a startup makes in some months. Of course is possible, look at the example of Sketchup, there was dozens of great 3d modeling tools and they gained a good market position innovating where others grasp: usability for newbies. But they had to be great on this, good usability wouldn´t be enough..

adrianhoward 15y ago

You don't have to replace all of Adobe CS to compete with Adobe CS. Not many of the folk I know with CS actually use the vast majority of it. For example I do almost no print work. All the stuff Adobe sweat over for the print folk - doesn't impact me in the slightest. In fact it gets in the way of the stuff I need to do since it adds complexity to the UI. In the Mac land a bunch of folk are switching to paid tools like Pixelmator and Acorn as alternatives to Photoshop for some work. They don't replace everything that PS dues, but offer what a subset of the PS audience needs for a substantially cheaper price with some arguably better functionality in a few places. I know people who have CS and Pixelmator, and spend most of their time in the latter and just bring up CS when they need something "clever". Both Pixelmator and Acorn seem to be doing very well for themselves - and I think both are still single developer shops. What nobody apart from Adobe seems to be really doing is the "suite" part - managing the integration well. For example - I would part with $200 in a heartbeat for a micro-suite that handled bitmap and vector work together to the same level that Pixelmator managed bitmap stuff, with some nice glue/plugins to support where I work (web apps, mobile apps, pushing out multiple resolution versions, etc.).

Someone 15y ago
Not as nice as true integration, but in OmniGraffle you can link to an external file for the image in an object instead of copying it into the document. Better yet, when OmniGraffle receives focus, it notices when such external files change, and updates the document (I use 4.2.3 of OmniGraffle Pro, which is old, so this feature may have been improved and/or removed) The latest version of OmniGraffle has Bezier curves, but I haven't used them, so I do not know whether they are any good, but I would guess that they may be lacking for the cases where you want to do more artistic drawing. It is more a diagramming tool than a drawing tool.
- adrianhoward 15y ago
  I like OmniGraffle - just upgraded it in fact - but it's a very different kind of product from Illustrator :)

pg 15y ago

(Incidentally, an idea with these types of objections to it tends to be a good startup idea.)