Having said that, I think Adobe can still continue to grow with the overall digital/creative market growth, even if they are losing market share on a couple of the flagship products. They have some enterprise cloud software and I guess the photography/print design/illustration users are still there.

Adobe must know this, and their lack of agility must be no accident. It’s like they’ve turned from being a versatile army of innovative creative developers into a strategically located stronghold of trolls.

I understand that there's lots of people that don't fit that description. That they would also like to use Adobe's tools is perhaps not entirely a sign of decline.

This might be less of a problem if they hadn't also slashed education discounts (pupils and students used to get 80-90% discount, presumably to discourage buying used or pirating)

Just because Adobe is doing the transition poorly (albeit you wouldn't know from their share price), I don't necessarily buy that it's a fundamental flaw in the SaaS business model. Indeed Figma & Canva are both SaaS companies themselves. As MSFT has shown, it doesn't take much for a giant to come back. I don't think Adobe is particularly cash-strapped so they can weather out a bunch of mistakes/internal realignment.

The younger generation will reach for the more affordable options like Figma, Sketch, Canva. Everyone will know how to use these tools a lot better so this these will become the new standards in the workplace.

That's how you build your userbase 5-10 years into the future. That should be a no-brainer.

What's harder to price in a discount with SaaS is how to deal with smaller companies. Startups with almost no money but that could grow into lucrative customers down the line.

That absolutely has the result of eating into Adobe's bottom line. Even big companies that can easily afford Adobe's prices aren't going to pay them if their employees don't even want to use the software.

Sure you get updates now, Adobe was very bad at even basic patching before the CC era, they offer features that no one I know is requesting. It's like a fishmonger backing up the van and dumping a bunch of fish you don't need then billing you every month.

So bring on the competitors. I'm a big fan of Sketch on the Mac.

Sure, they are clearly ceding a chunk of the market to other companies. I don't think it's obvious that this is a bad business decision...

It’s very different now it’s all done by PDF - as long as it’s formatted correctly it doesn’t matter what program created it or how old it was.

Later, though, I seem to recall some printers accepting PDF/x-1a files – I don’t know if the industry has transitioned to that now, or if some still prefer a collect for output.

That's massive in my book. Subscription software is a scam.

For a design house, licensing is not an insignificant cost of business. Its justifiable because thats the fastest tool for their workforce.

for a small company without a design team, it probably makes sense to just use the cheap/free stuff and style it out.

And it wasn't even $600.00

I took that route and haven’t missed Adobe at all.

Sure they can have the user use a $0 piece of SW, but if it’s costing more than $50 a month in productivity via frustration, unfamiliarity or shortcoming (90% of the value at $0), Thats misuse of that person’s talent and detrimental to the success of the company.

It is not like $600 dollars is going to bankrupt your company. Their would be something seriously wrong if your company couldn't send me the money.

If the size of your company allows for $10,000 software purchases I would expense me for 2 copies. Next year you can use that budget for post covid grow.

I'm pretty sure I'm not actually allowed to charge them to a grant.

I then contacted two local partners and none of them allowed me to buy the license as a student. One said that the student discount did not exist, and the other one siad thst my University had to buy it for me.

All of these other activities are far from being friction-less. But the problem is that you have to remember to disable the thing otherwise it's going to burn a hole in the pocket and they are counting on that.

I started creating graphics in high school on the Gimp, which was a natural transition to a (gifted) copy of PSCS2, and I've been using my college version of CS5 ever since afterwards. That route to graphic design would've never happened at their current prices. They're burning a whole generation of designers.

Fifty bucks a month is less than I charge for one single-character flat color commission, which is something I can do in an hour or two.

I am not at all surprised that most comic cover gigs pay like shit. Comics generally pay like shit.

And all that said I sure did pirate Illustrator for a decade until I was at the point where paying the full subscription was the easiest route. If I was a broke student now I’d probably be getting into Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator.

Let's be crystal clear here.

$600 is the subscription for ALL of the Adobe Apps. That means you're paying $600 for what? 15-20 different apps? That means you're averaging around $40 per app. Which is roughly the same cost per month as other competitors products. Adobe XD is $9.99/month which is the same cost as Sketch $99/year and has more functionality then Sketch. If you toss in the additional $8/month for InVision, then XD is now cheaper. A lot of orgs like having one vendor for all of those apps as opposed to having multiple subs for several different companies.

I'm no Adobe apologist, but let's make sure when people are tossing around the $600 cost, we're comparing apples to apples. You can hack on them for their lack luster customer support, new versions not working on newer PC's and completely ignoring Linux users - but arguing about price? Not really a good enough reason not to use them in my opinion. Over the past few years, the newer apps they've come out with, they're keeping their pricing competitive: XD vs Sketch/InVision vs Figma.

Their pricing has also slowly come down as more competitors come into the market. I agree, I don't see them declining, they just need to stay competitive now that they are a number of legit products to compete with several of their products.

I think lots of software companies( and entrepreneurs) are seeing Adobe's revenue stream and asking "Whats the moat?, What's stopping us from building the top 5-10 Adobe features and charging $300 / year?"

It would seem that Adobe doesn't have much of a moat and that perhaps their software will be commoditized as we move forward.

The cracked adobe products from 10 years ago provide most of the functionality the new subscription does at a big discount.

In a way those warez (sp) crackers cared about you more than adobe ever did.

It's expensive for what a lot of those workers use it for. In the pre-SAAS days, companies would handle this by having an few license and not necessarily following the upgrade churn.

Going SAAS only "solved" that for Adobe, but disgruntled that user base that is now no longer served. This obviously creates market room.

$600 is nothing for a worker who is going to be in a software an appreciable part of every week. When it's $600 here, $300 there, $1000 here for stuff they only use a few times a month? Not a good deal.

The user base that is disgruntled are the ones that would have been using the cracked versions anyways, so there's no monetary loss to adobe at all in that regard.

I get being a poor student that can't afford the software that you eventually need to know how to use. I grew up learning Adobe products from those cracked versions. However, now that I'm a working stiff, I pay for my software. I can't think of the last time I used a cracked version. Everyone has to start somewhere. Adobe now gives full version access via trials for 30-days.

I disagree; I think I correctly identified a user base of corporations and users who would much rather do things right, but don't have 600/yr/user of need. Currently they are paying adobe subscriptions, or juggling free trials. If someone offers them good-enough software for significantly less, they won't think twice about jumping.

This is separate from the issues of students etc. using cracked or 'educational' versions. Some of them may not like the subscription only approach, but as you say that isn't a real impact to bottom line because they would never buy it.

600$ a year for an industry standard that makes a person productive isn't a lot. But what happens when 50% of your workforce is using a different tool that they're more comfortable with because they've already invested 5-10 years into learning it?

It's not expensive for a productivity boost once you're a professional. The question is, if you are a professional, and you're just now getting to the point where you can afford to start using Adobe tools, are they so much better than the tools you've been using your entire life that they're still worth $600 a month? Will they still provide a productivity boost that justifies their cost if they're not an industry standard anymore?

Right now, Adobe products are still at least arguably (if not obviously) an industry standard. But when we talk about a market decline, a current decline in hobbyist usage may signal a heavy future decline in the professional market. It's not necessarily the case that they're completely separate from each other.

Part of my point is that people would do well to consider how Adobe approaches the situation before they expend a bunch of emotional energy wishing it were otherwise.

Launching features on iOS/macOS first is a business decision that makes the most money (probably) but it's this very reason I slowly started replacing Adobe software.

Adobe XD, especially in the beginning, would leave Android and Windows users in a lurch focusing their efforts primarily on Mac/iPhone users.

For instance, real time mobile preview via USB (MISSION CRITICAL!!!!!), a feature requested December 16, 2016 ¹ was implemented on iOS on February 04, 2019. Worse still, this feature works on iDevices but only with a Mac. As of last December when I last checked, this was still not possible on Windows for either mobile platforms.

Sure, as late as 2009, users were evenly split between Mac and Windows. Prior, it was more Mac users. It has since changed with majority of Adobe users on Windows. ² So this steadfast commitment to Apple users makes no sense when the majority of your users are on Windows!

Switched to Figma once I started using Linux as my daily driver.

1. https://adobexd.uservoice.com/forums/353007-adobe-xd-feature...

2. https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/adobe-cc-os-market-...

This supports the notion that it isn't particularly expensive!

I didn't say "it's the cheapest" or "it's the best value", I said it wasn't expensive, and qualified the remark with a statement about the group of users I believe that Adobe targets.

People are replying that they think it's a bad decision to ignore user acquisition from less expensive licensing options, but that is separate from whether Adobe is having any trouble finding users (they appear to be printing money).

For many people and companies in my region their license is unafordable.

Other companies that offer subscription based es services, like Microsoft, Spotify, Disney, several antivirus vendors offer lower prices.

I mean, I could afford the student price, but not the commercial price of their subscription .

What other software/service with the amount of users of Adobe charge $50/mo?

The pricing is set based on their lockdown through their closed file format, so the competitions can't exist.

I disagree, from my own experience and people I know in graphic design field, Adobe products just feel clunky and unintuitive. First time I've tried Sketch, I was blown away by how simple and intuitive the interface is and I would not mind paying the same or more for Sketch compared to Adobe suite.

The goal of software is to make me work faster and more efficient, if 2x more expensive software makes me work 3x faster - it's always worth the price.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I use Lightroom quite a bit. I purchased Lightroom 4.0 back in 2013, and it has been worth every penny, but now I'm stuck on version 4.0 forever because I refuse to pay a never-ending monthly fee for software that I use as an amateur.

I use Darktable now. It's an excellent open-source competitor, but it's not as good as Lightroom. I would gladly pay a few hundred dollars to buy a perpetual license for a new version.

Edit: I mispoke, I'm using version 4.4.1. Not sure, how different that is from 4.0