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>So, is someone going to do a startup to obliterate Adobe's print and graphics production monopoly, or what? Sure, they would just have to build a compelling s

by batista 14y ago

>So, is someone going to do a startup to obliterate Adobe's print and graphics production monopoly, or what? Sure, they would just have to build a compelling set of apps, for Windows and Mac at the least, that have 90% of those features that Adobe has built to their apps since 1990. There DO exist competing products for Adobe stuff, but they are disparate. The best of them is Quark (vs InDesign). Final Cut Pro/Avid et co do a nice work against Premiere. Inscape is quite good to replace Illustrator, maybe Corel Draw too. Gimp is not there yet, but Corel Photo-Paint and Painter combined would make a compelling proposal. So, you have parts here and there, but not streamlined nor combined. And for all the "bloat talk", Photoshop can handle huge images with ease whereas lesser programs throw the towel even at 200MB or so. (We have tons of 20% solutions -- they are not any good for professional printing and graphics work with the ease and breadth current designers are used to, even missing extremely critical parts, like CMYK in some cases).

Silhouette 14y ago
We have tons of 20% solutions -- they are not any good for professional printing and graphics work Yes, that's the real problem. None of the OSS offerings is really anywhere close to the equivalent CS tool yet: not Inkscape, not the GIMP, not Scribus. Quark and Corel should have the pedigree, but last time I had this conversation I looked up the latest features in Corel's graphics software, and it's basically a second-tier player these days. I've never used Quark, but the picture painted by others looks similar. The thing that puzzles me is why no-one has yet come up with a credible competitor to CS (or, similarly, to MS Office). Two of the most successful software companies on the planet make a very significant chunk of their profits on these product lines, and they are certainly open to disruption by competition based on usability and/or quality/reliability as well as functionality and workflow. Of course there's a substantial barrier to entry, but it's not that unassailable in software terms.
- xsmasher 14y ago
  There are also network effects at play - your co-workers create .psd files, and your printing company takes .psd files, so you use Photoshop. There is also ample training material, frequent conferences, etc. That was Corel's problem - not matter how good a tool they made, printers either could not open the files, or were scared off by bad experiences with previous versions. Google docs has only succeed because "close enough" formatting was good enough for business docs and spreadsheets. Not so in graphic design.
  - batista 14y ago
    Actually, Google Docs has not succeeded. You and I may used, but last time I checked it had something like a 1% share of the "office suite" (i.e if you include desktop Office et al).
- hamburglar 14y ago
  You're not going to see an OSS app that competes in the professional printing world unless it's sponsored by someone with deep pockets. It simply is not practical for lone hackers, no matter how talented, to crank out code that produces the correct results for graphics professionals without having hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of esoteric equipment to run tests (and debug) on. You'll waste thousands of dollars in film/paper alone just testing your feature set on a single model of imagesetter. This is one of Adobe's strengths: massive familiarity with high-end graphics output devices.
yardie 14y ago
Quark was the Adobe of their time. If you thought the licensing of Adobe is intrusive now you should here the stories of Quark licensing in the 90s. They took piracy paranoia to an insane level. And the companies that bought Xpress sometimes reverted to the pirated copies because at least those worked.
- jonah 14y ago
  Also Xpress was so bad, InDesign became dominant shortly after it was released.
  - yardie 14y ago
    Indesign 1.0 definitely did not. It was Quark's market to lose and by Indesign 2.0 prepress shops were just starting to take Indesign files. The rest is history.
    - jonah 14y ago
      The designers I worked with at the time were early proponents of InDesign and basically told printers: "If you want our business, you'll have to buy InDesign." They did.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- redler 14y ago
  The Quark/Adobe dance is fascinating. Quark became more and more user-hostile through the 90s, basking in the dominant market share of their (essentially) single product. Prices went up, the feature set stagnated, anti-piracy measures punished the honest, and Quark tried to push ill-conceived "multimedia" and web features into the product. Focus was lacking not only in their product, but in how the company was run: development and support were moved to India, and then a few years later moved right back. And despite all this, in terms of dominance Quark XPress was like the Photoshop of its time: with all the professional workflow based on the product, the ecosystem of expensive plug-ins, and the people whose jobs were practically defined by their Quark expertise, it was difficult to imagine how any competitor could gain traction. But Quark's unpopularity with its captive customers created a fertile field of potential good will for anyone with the gumption to try jumping in. And the nimble upstart who finally gained traction was of course Adobe. InDesign was cheap, good, addressed many of the long-term unresolved Quark pain points, and, despite bugs and shortcomings, held the promise of a future outside Quark's cloak. A decade later, where are we? The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
crag 14y ago
You forgot one: Pixelmator @ http://www.pixelmator.com/ http://www.pixelmator.com/ Granted it's only image editing. And it's mac only. But I've pretty much stopped using Photoshop because of it. Though, I've never use any of the advanced Photoshop tools. Many graphics folk on Photoshop are stuck cause they can't see any other product filling Photoshop's role.

by batista 14y ago

Silhouette 14y ago

We have tons of 20% solutions -- they are not any good for professional printing and graphics work Yes, that's the real problem. None of the OSS offerings is really anywhere close to the equivalent CS tool yet: not Inkscape, not the GIMP, not Scribus. Quark and Corel should have the pedigree, but last time I had this conversation I looked up the latest features in Corel's graphics software, and it's basically a second-tier player these days. I've never used Quark, but the picture painted by others looks similar. The thing that puzzles me is why no-one has yet come up with a credible competitor to CS (or, similarly, to MS Office). Two of the most successful software companies on the planet make a very significant chunk of their profits on these product lines, and they are certainly open to disruption by competition based on usability and/or quality/reliability as well as functionality and workflow. Of course there's a substantial barrier to entry, but it's not that unassailable in software terms.

xsmasher 14y ago
There are also network effects at play - your co-workers create .psd files, and your printing company takes .psd files, so you use Photoshop. There is also ample training material, frequent conferences, etc. That was Corel's problem - not matter how good a tool they made, printers either could not open the files, or were scared off by bad experiences with previous versions. Google docs has only succeed because "close enough" formatting was good enough for business docs and spreadsheets. Not so in graphic design.
- batista 14y ago
  Actually, Google Docs has not succeeded. You and I may used, but last time I checked it had something like a 1% share of the "office suite" (i.e if you include desktop Office et al).
hamburglar 14y ago
You're not going to see an OSS app that competes in the professional printing world unless it's sponsored by someone with deep pockets. It simply is not practical for lone hackers, no matter how talented, to crank out code that produces the correct results for graphics professionals without having hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of esoteric equipment to run tests (and debug) on. You'll waste thousands of dollars in film/paper alone just testing your feature set on a single model of imagesetter. This is one of Adobe's strengths: massive familiarity with high-end graphics output devices.

yardie 14y ago

Quark was the Adobe of their time. If you thought the licensing of Adobe is intrusive now you should here the stories of Quark licensing in the 90s. They took piracy paranoia to an insane level. And the companies that bought Xpress sometimes reverted to the pirated copies because at least those worked.

jonah 14y ago
Also Xpress was so bad, InDesign became dominant shortly after it was released.
- yardie 14y ago
  Indesign 1.0 definitely did not. It was Quark's market to lose and by Indesign 2.0 prepress shops were just starting to take Indesign files. The rest is history.
  - jonah 14y ago
    The designers I worked with at the time were early proponents of InDesign and basically told printers: "If you want our business, you'll have to buy InDesign." They did.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
redler 14y ago
The Quark/Adobe dance is fascinating. Quark became more and more user-hostile through the 90s, basking in the dominant market share of their (essentially) single product. Prices went up, the feature set stagnated, anti-piracy measures punished the honest, and Quark tried to push ill-conceived "multimedia" and web features into the product. Focus was lacking not only in their product, but in how the company was run: development and support were moved to India, and then a few years later moved right back. And despite all this, in terms of dominance Quark XPress was like the Photoshop of its time: with all the professional workflow based on the product, the ecosystem of expensive plug-ins, and the people whose jobs were practically defined by their Quark expertise, it was difficult to imagine how any competitor could gain traction. But Quark's unpopularity with its captive customers created a fertile field of potential good will for anyone with the gumption to try jumping in. And the nimble upstart who finally gained traction was of course Adobe. InDesign was cheap, good, addressed many of the long-term unresolved Quark pain points, and, despite bugs and shortcomings, held the promise of a future outside Quark's cloak. A decade later, where are we? The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

crag 14y ago

You forgot one: Pixelmator @ http://www.pixelmator.com/ http://www.pixelmator.com/ Granted it's only image editing. And it's mac only. But I've pretty much stopped using Photoshop because of it. Though, I've never use any of the advanced Photoshop tools. Many graphics folk on Photoshop are stuck cause they can't see any other product filling Photoshop's role.