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

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.