4 ms·

PR damage control. BTW, Adobe seems to be a vulnerable giant to be taken over. Not sure why no startups target them.

by cygwin98 13y ago

cmbaus 13y ago
I think they have, but it is subtle. It could be argued that Instagram was a shot over Adobe's bow.
- cygwin98 13y ago
  Not sure if Instagram is a competitor to Adobe though, maybe over their low-end mobile apps. I was thinking of Adobe's cashcow -- Creative Suite. That could be a good niche market for C++ programmers from game companies to build their startups on. Adobe of today is like RIMM in 2007 before the original iPhone was announced.
  - oblio 13y ago
    Ah, yes, Apple, that hip startup that undermined the RIM powerhouse :)
  - samman 13y ago
    I was just thinking this morning about how from a technology standpoint Adobe seems to be way ahead of virtually everyone else at the moment. The only competing (pro to prosumer level) applications I've seen that are comparable with regard to features and polish to anything in Adobe's suite seem to be video editors (Final Cut, Vegas, Premiere), and maybe something like Aperture. It gives me a lot more respect for what Gimp and Inkscape are trying to accomplish, but it's a very long road they have ahead of them. In the low-end space there was the Aviary suite, which despite really interesting potential seems to have pivoted to mobile. Pixelmator and Paint.NET have done an extremely good job at providing basic layered image editing functionality, but I don't see anything emerging to challenge Adobe yet. A competitor in the Pro/Prosumer space would need to develop, from scratch, extremely sophisticated, feature-rich applications to replace Adobe's big 4: Image Editing, Vector Graphics, Motion Graphics, and Video Editing. They'd also need to tightly integrate these applications. This would be HARD. I don't think that the effort/risk/reward proposition looks very attractive for startups or their investors. Also, while game programmers might have some useful experience, I think that computer vision programmers would be much more familiar with the problem domain. Apple, or maybe Corel probably would have done this a long time ago if it was feasible.
    - camus2 13y ago
      Adobe only dominates the photo editing / print sector. They are not the industry standard neither in motion graphics nor video editing. They are losing the web developper market and they could be losing the web and game graphics market too ( ince they killed Fireworks ).
      - samman 13y ago
        That's a fair point. Photoshop and Illustrator are definitely their flagship products, and I didn't even bother mentioning their web tools (HTML5 is rapidly making Flash a legacy/zombie product, and I don't think there's any single clearly dominant web design/dev tool/toolchain -- although I'd argue that the majority of mockups still occur in Photoshop, and slicing up PSDs for the web is still done). I mentioned Premiere and After Effects because they're the other 'big' apps that Adobe develops, and they do integrate tightly with their main 2-- but as you mentioned, Premiere and AE definitely have very healthy competition. Which brings up an interesting question...if After Effects and Premiere have strong competition, why don't Photoshop and Illustrator have equally strong competitors? I've already taken a guess, but I'm interested in other perspectives.
erickhill 13y ago
I worked at a competitor company in the late 90s. Their marketing muscle was nearly impossible to overcome. You either died (like the company I was at) or you became acquired, like Aldus, Macromedia... Photoshop.
lcampbell 13y ago
For Photoshop, at least, I suspect most of their cool image manipulation tech is patent protected, and that they've got a legal team rigorously enforcing those patents.

PR damage control. BTW, Adobe seems to be a vulnerable giant to be taken over. Not sure why no startups target them.

cmbaus 13y ago

I think they have, but it is subtle. It could be argued that Instagram was a shot over Adobe's bow.

cygwin98 13y ago
Not sure if Instagram is a competitor to Adobe though, maybe over their low-end mobile apps. I was thinking of Adobe's cashcow -- Creative Suite. That could be a good niche market for C++ programmers from game companies to build their startups on. Adobe of today is like RIMM in 2007 before the original iPhone was announced.
- oblio 13y ago
  Ah, yes, Apple, that hip startup that undermined the RIM powerhouse :)
- samman 13y ago
  I was just thinking this morning about how from a technology standpoint Adobe seems to be way ahead of virtually everyone else at the moment. The only competing (pro to prosumer level) applications I've seen that are comparable with regard to features and polish to anything in Adobe's suite seem to be video editors (Final Cut, Vegas, Premiere), and maybe something like Aperture. It gives me a lot more respect for what Gimp and Inkscape are trying to accomplish, but it's a very long road they have ahead of them. In the low-end space there was the Aviary suite, which despite really interesting potential seems to have pivoted to mobile. Pixelmator and Paint.NET have done an extremely good job at providing basic layered image editing functionality, but I don't see anything emerging to challenge Adobe yet. A competitor in the Pro/Prosumer space would need to develop, from scratch, extremely sophisticated, feature-rich applications to replace Adobe's big 4: Image Editing, Vector Graphics, Motion Graphics, and Video Editing. They'd also need to tightly integrate these applications. This would be HARD. I don't think that the effort/risk/reward proposition looks very attractive for startups or their investors. Also, while game programmers might have some useful experience, I think that computer vision programmers would be much more familiar with the problem domain. Apple, or maybe Corel probably would have done this a long time ago if it was feasible.
  - camus2 13y ago
    Adobe only dominates the photo editing / print sector. They are not the industry standard neither in motion graphics nor video editing. They are losing the web developper market and they could be losing the web and game graphics market too ( ince they killed Fireworks ).
    - samman 13y ago
      That's a fair point. Photoshop and Illustrator are definitely their flagship products, and I didn't even bother mentioning their web tools (HTML5 is rapidly making Flash a legacy/zombie product, and I don't think there's any single clearly dominant web design/dev tool/toolchain -- although I'd argue that the majority of mockups still occur in Photoshop, and slicing up PSDs for the web is still done). I mentioned Premiere and After Effects because they're the other 'big' apps that Adobe develops, and they do integrate tightly with their main 2-- but as you mentioned, Premiere and AE definitely have very healthy competition. Which brings up an interesting question...if After Effects and Premiere have strong competition, why don't Photoshop and Illustrator have equally strong competitors? I've already taken a guess, but I'm interested in other perspectives.

erickhill 13y ago

I worked at a competitor company in the late 90s. Their marketing muscle was nearly impossible to overcome. You either died (like the company I was at) or you became acquired, like Aldus, Macromedia... Photoshop.

lcampbell 13y ago

For Photoshop, at least, I suspect most of their cool image manipulation tech is patent protected, and that they've got a legal team rigorously enforcing those patents.