6 ms·

Adobe Acquires Photo-Editing Platform Aviary

139 points by zabalmendi 12y ago

samsolomon 12y ago
I have to worry every time Adobe makes an acquisition. Seldom do the products improve.
- trimetric 12y ago
  I don't think they've screwed up Typekit at all.
  - radley 12y ago
    Is that a joke? For me, it's now intrusive: I can't turn off Typekit notifications and suggestions, even though I use Suitcase Fusion.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  Flash Professional improved. Typekit improved and I would say Behance has improved. I know it's cool to crap on Adobe but they've gotten a lot better in recent years. EDIT Changed Illustrator to Flash Professional. Forgot which was an acquisition.
  - cpr 12y ago
    You mean Photoshop, not Illustrator, improved? The latter was Adobe's first app and lovingly crafted by Warnock and crew. (I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. ;-)
    - wldcordeiro 12y ago
      Ah yeah, I don't know why I said Illustrator. I might have been thinking of the Flash Professional program, which has improved but Flash itself is on its way out.
  - aikah 12y ago
    Fireworks is dead,dreamweaver almost ... and no Fireworks isnt the same product as Photoshop or Illustrator.As for flash they are removing drawing tools that are "redundant" with Illustrator.So no,everything hasnt been a lot better in recent years...
- jrapdx3 12y ago
  Perhaps even more troublesome, seems Adobe is buying out a company that provides or could develop competing software. Judging by discussions here there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's retrenchment to "cloud-only" SaaS policies, and alternatives are sparse. Likely it's not accidental that there's essentially no competition in the professional graphics software arena where Adobe products dominate. This acquisition gives the appearance of Adobe trying to maintain its monopoly, and I'm inclined to think it's not really a healthy development.
- liquidise 12y ago
  Though the adoption has fallen, ActionScript 3 was a near strict improvement over 2, and it was released a good while after the Macromedia acquisition.
  - krilnon 12y ago
    It was primarily developed at Macromedia, if you don't count that Waldemar Horwat and others greatly influenced its design via the whole JS2/ES4 situation in the years prior. That's why AVM2's IR used to be called the Macromedia Intermediate Representation, for example. There were public betas available about 6 months after the acquisition, which didn't leave Adobe much time to change anything. Even the main APIs, like those in playerglobal.swc, almost all have a copyright stamp of 2005 in them.
- damon_c 12y ago
  COSA After Effects has come a long way!
Xeoncross 12y ago
There really isn't any other software to compete at this point. Aviary and Gimp were the only Photoshop competitors. Inkscape and Aviary were the only Illustrator competitors.
- dbla 12y ago
  Is sketch considered more of an Illustrator competitor?
- andrewljohnson 12y ago
  Pixelmator is the best photoshop replacement IMO.
  - eli 12y ago
    I like & use Pixelmator too, but it's really a Photoshop Elements competitor.
    - jkestner 12y ago
      Depends on your usage, I guess. I haven't used Photoshop Elements, but Pixelmator does 90% of what I used to use Photoshop for, from photo editing, color correction and retouching to prep for web. Really only go to Photoshop for certain filters, serious masking and color contortions. I use it more than I used to use Photoshop as it got bloated, and Pixelmator launches in a flash.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Acorn is also really nice. Of course, it's more lightweight than Photoshop (in the positive and negative senses).
- ThomPete 12y ago
  There is a reason for this. It makes no sense to make a photoshop competitor as this is not where we are heading. Instead we are heading towards vectors as the primary asset which means toward visual editors that allow for scripting and much more granular control off assets such as animiation. In 5-10 years ex. Sketch and other much more dynamic environments will be one of the de-facto standards as the older generations retire and the new ones come in. Photoshop is the Quark of our time and it's heading for retirement I think. P.S. I am part of the older generation and still uses Illustrator and sometimes Photoshop. I loved Fireworks but Adobe killed it. However, having played around with Sketch I think I see where things are heading.
xxdesmus 12y ago
I'm really shocked this didn't happen months ago actually. Seemed like a very logical fit for Adobe. I just hope they don't ruin Aviary now.
liquidise 12y ago
Surprising negativity in here, an observation to consider: HN tends to be biased regarding acquisitions. Some companies, like Google or Apple, are praised for sage decisions and invaluable acqui-hires. Others, like Yahoo and Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products or otherwise flailing capital. As i see it, Adobe identified a group of devs uniquely qualified to bring domain knowledge to their team, as well as mobile expertise they may have lacked. This strikes me as a reasonable strategic move on their part.
- mmanfrin 12y ago
  I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe. Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service? People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the time being.
  - hnriot 12y ago
    come on, that's just crazy, Aviary is no competition for Adobe. There are a million photo editing apps, and Aviary is one of them, but Adobe is the giant gorilla in the game, the go-to software for designers and photographers.
    - nkozyra 12y ago
      I think you're making an analogous comparison, which is not necessarily the right one. Aviary needs to compete not on features so much as audience. If Aviary can do 80% of what Adobe does for some % of users and it convinces those users to eschew their CC subscription, they are a competitor. In other words, it's less the product and more the people.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      You must not have visited the Adobe forums in recent times. A sizable chunk of Creative Suite developers highly dislikes Creative Cloud (you can only get new versions via a subscription). So, many of them are probably on the lookout for alternatives. As a longtime Lightroom user, I am happy that the most recent version can still be purchased as a standalone license. But they certainly seem to be steering people to the subscription model there as well.
brianbreslin 12y ago
Honestly I expected this to happen 2+ years ago. Glad to hear the Aviary team held on, since I never heard of anyone paying/using for their amazing tools (which were cutting edge back when they launched).
taude 12y ago
Gotta say I'm surprised this didn't happen years ago when Aviary made all those flash-based web tools for editing Vectors, photos, etc...
bwang29 12y ago
It's very sad to see Aviary go and didn't choose to continue pushing their web editors to a more advanced audience and photo hobbyists. If they're abandoning plans moving forward in the web, Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/ https://www.polarr.co/) might just be the last player trying to push web photo editing experience. It always seems like the web has not done with photo processing yet though companies are all jumping into mobile these days or moving on to video processing.
- chenyisheng 12y ago
  Just signed up and find Polarr is probably a much better on-line photo editing platform for me. It is what I call Lightroom-on-demand! Plus, there are much more potentials for its intelligent personal style learning.
dharma1 12y ago
nice. I think it's just a question of time until someone makes a web based Photoshop killer again though. Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC)
- justrandomanon 12y ago
  Is a web based photoshop something anyone needs? (I'm talking an app with comparable features, not a basic photo editor).
  - dharma1 12y ago
    You don't need feature parity - even if it initially served the needs of 20-30% of Photoshop users, it would be a threat to Adobe. The feasibility barrier and cost of building a web app with some of the feature set of Photoshop is getting lower and lower. If the transfer speed is an issue, it could work on local files - most of the code could be client side.
- CGudapati 12y ago
  I think a web based killer is very far away in the time line. I recently was trying to make a huge gird in Photoshop and my i7+10gbRAM computer was unable to handle it. I think very simple stuff like annotating and cropping/red-eye fix can be done but I think a web based photo editor will fail when huge performance is required.
  - orbifold 12y ago
    Not sure what your exact setup was, but your graphics card might simply have run out of memory. Which would then have happened pretty much independently from the software you were using.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  >Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC) I don't think it's much. I imagine most of the revenue, or at least where the healthy margins are, is the marketing and publishing clouds. Extremely lucrative enterprise software.
ninavizz 12y ago
If Aviary owns any patents in the photo-editing realm, those alone were worth the acquisition to Adobe. Aviary has active partnerships with Yahoo! Mail and others, as their primary built-in photo-editing default utility. The second part of the win for Adobe, is they can now slather the Adobe brand, all over where the Aviary brand is now prominent, in those partnerships. That's what matters to the money folks.
kclay 12y ago
This took to long to happen, Congrats for them.
yangshun 12y ago
Anybody knows the deal amount?

139 points by zabalmendi 12y ago

samsolomon 12y ago

I have to worry every time Adobe makes an acquisition. Seldom do the products improve.

trimetric 12y ago
I don't think they've screwed up Typekit at all.
- radley 12y ago
  Is that a joke? For me, it's now intrusive: I can't turn off Typekit notifications and suggestions, even though I use Suitcase Fusion.
wldcordeiro 12y ago
Flash Professional improved. Typekit improved and I would say Behance has improved. I know it's cool to crap on Adobe but they've gotten a lot better in recent years. EDIT Changed Illustrator to Flash Professional. Forgot which was an acquisition.
- cpr 12y ago
  You mean Photoshop, not Illustrator, improved? The latter was Adobe's first app and lovingly crafted by Warnock and crew. (I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. ;-)
  - wldcordeiro 12y ago
    Ah yeah, I don't know why I said Illustrator. I might have been thinking of the Flash Professional program, which has improved but Flash itself is on its way out.
- aikah 12y ago
  Fireworks is dead,dreamweaver almost ... and no Fireworks isnt the same product as Photoshop or Illustrator.As for flash they are removing drawing tools that are "redundant" with Illustrator.So no,everything hasnt been a lot better in recent years...
jrapdx3 12y ago
Perhaps even more troublesome, seems Adobe is buying out a company that provides or could develop competing software. Judging by discussions here there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's retrenchment to "cloud-only" SaaS policies, and alternatives are sparse. Likely it's not accidental that there's essentially no competition in the professional graphics software arena where Adobe products dominate. This acquisition gives the appearance of Adobe trying to maintain its monopoly, and I'm inclined to think it's not really a healthy development.
liquidise 12y ago
Though the adoption has fallen, ActionScript 3 was a near strict improvement over 2, and it was released a good while after the Macromedia acquisition.
- krilnon 12y ago
  It was primarily developed at Macromedia, if you don't count that Waldemar Horwat and others greatly influenced its design via the whole JS2/ES4 situation in the years prior. That's why AVM2's IR used to be called the Macromedia Intermediate Representation, for example. There were public betas available about 6 months after the acquisition, which didn't leave Adobe much time to change anything. Even the main APIs, like those in playerglobal.swc, almost all have a copyright stamp of 2005 in them.
damon_c 12y ago
COSA After Effects has come a long way!

Xeoncross 12y ago

There really isn't any other software to compete at this point. Aviary and Gimp were the only Photoshop competitors. Inkscape and Aviary were the only Illustrator competitors.

dbla 12y ago
Is sketch considered more of an Illustrator competitor?
andrewljohnson 12y ago
Pixelmator is the best photoshop replacement IMO.
- eli 12y ago
  I like & use Pixelmator too, but it's really a Photoshop Elements competitor.
  - jkestner 12y ago
    Depends on your usage, I guess. I haven't used Photoshop Elements, but Pixelmator does 90% of what I used to use Photoshop for, from photo editing, color correction and retouching to prep for web. Really only go to Photoshop for certain filters, serious masking and color contortions. I use it more than I used to use Photoshop as it got bloated, and Pixelmator launches in a flash.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Acorn is also really nice. Of course, it's more lightweight than Photoshop (in the positive and negative senses).
ThomPete 12y ago
There is a reason for this. It makes no sense to make a photoshop competitor as this is not where we are heading. Instead we are heading towards vectors as the primary asset which means toward visual editors that allow for scripting and much more granular control off assets such as animiation. In 5-10 years ex. Sketch and other much more dynamic environments will be one of the de-facto standards as the older generations retire and the new ones come in. Photoshop is the Quark of our time and it's heading for retirement I think. P.S. I am part of the older generation and still uses Illustrator and sometimes Photoshop. I loved Fireworks but Adobe killed it. However, having played around with Sketch I think I see where things are heading.

xxdesmus 12y ago

I'm really shocked this didn't happen months ago actually. Seemed like a very logical fit for Adobe. I just hope they don't ruin Aviary now.

liquidise 12y ago

Surprising negativity in here, an observation to consider: HN tends to be biased regarding acquisitions. Some companies, like Google or Apple, are praised for sage decisions and invaluable acqui-hires. Others, like Yahoo and Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products or otherwise flailing capital. As i see it, Adobe identified a group of devs uniquely qualified to bring domain knowledge to their team, as well as mobile expertise they may have lacked. This strikes me as a reasonable strategic move on their part.

mmanfrin 12y ago
I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe. Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service? People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the time being.
- hnriot 12y ago
  come on, that's just crazy, Aviary is no competition for Adobe. There are a million photo editing apps, and Aviary is one of them, but Adobe is the giant gorilla in the game, the go-to software for designers and photographers.
  - nkozyra 12y ago
    I think you're making an analogous comparison, which is not necessarily the right one. Aviary needs to compete not on features so much as audience. If Aviary can do 80% of what Adobe does for some % of users and it convinces those users to eschew their CC subscription, they are a competitor. In other words, it's less the product and more the people.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    You must not have visited the Adobe forums in recent times. A sizable chunk of Creative Suite developers highly dislikes Creative Cloud (you can only get new versions via a subscription). So, many of them are probably on the lookout for alternatives. As a longtime Lightroom user, I am happy that the most recent version can still be purchased as a standalone license. But they certainly seem to be steering people to the subscription model there as well.

brianbreslin 12y ago

Honestly I expected this to happen 2+ years ago. Glad to hear the Aviary team held on, since I never heard of anyone paying/using for their amazing tools (which were cutting edge back when they launched).

taude 12y ago

Gotta say I'm surprised this didn't happen years ago when Aviary made all those flash-based web tools for editing Vectors, photos, etc...

bwang29 12y ago

It's very sad to see Aviary go and didn't choose to continue pushing their web editors to a more advanced audience and photo hobbyists. If they're abandoning plans moving forward in the web, Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/ https://www.polarr.co/) might just be the last player trying to push web photo editing experience. It always seems like the web has not done with photo processing yet though companies are all jumping into mobile these days or moving on to video processing.

chenyisheng 12y ago
Just signed up and find Polarr is probably a much better on-line photo editing platform for me. It is what I call Lightroom-on-demand! Plus, there are much more potentials for its intelligent personal style learning.

dharma1 12y ago

nice. I think it's just a question of time until someone makes a web based Photoshop killer again though. Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC)

justrandomanon 12y ago
Is a web based photoshop something anyone needs? (I'm talking an app with comparable features, not a basic photo editor).
- dharma1 12y ago
  You don't need feature parity - even if it initially served the needs of 20-30% of Photoshop users, it would be a threat to Adobe. The feasibility barrier and cost of building a web app with some of the feature set of Photoshop is getting lower and lower. If the transfer speed is an issue, it could work on local files - most of the code could be client side.
CGudapati 12y ago
I think a web based killer is very far away in the time line. I recently was trying to make a huge gird in Photoshop and my i7+10gbRAM computer was unable to handle it. I think very simple stuff like annotating and cropping/red-eye fix can be done but I think a web based photo editor will fail when huge performance is required.
- orbifold 12y ago
  Not sure what your exact setup was, but your graphics card might simply have run out of memory. Which would then have happened pretty much independently from the software you were using.
blumkvist 12y ago
>Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC) I don't think it's much. I imagine most of the revenue, or at least where the healthy margins are, is the marketing and publishing clouds. Extremely lucrative enterprise software.

ninavizz 12y ago

If Aviary owns any patents in the photo-editing realm, those alone were worth the acquisition to Adobe. Aviary has active partnerships with Yahoo! Mail and others, as their primary built-in photo-editing default utility. The second part of the win for Adobe, is they can now slather the Adobe brand, all over where the Aviary brand is now prominent, in those partnerships. That's what matters to the money folks.

kclay 12y ago

This took to long to happen, Congrats for them.

yangshun 12y ago

Anybody knows the deal amount?