And yet, I stayed on with Lightroom, thinking that so long as Adobe still had competition in that market, they'd keep it a one-off license. Then, one day, upon discovering some compatibility issues with the latest MacOS and the version of Lightroom I was using, I thought I'd check what the latest version of LR had to offer – and discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever.

It was painful researching and trialing alternatives, ultimately migrating my library over to Capture One, but it turned me so completely against Adobe that I've actively requested employers not assign me a Creative Cloud license (the tools fortunately only being tangential to my role).

"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.

I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.

The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.

I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.

You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).

Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.

Everyone else just lets you multi edit without the steel-trap lock-in layer.

You can even bulk download as many docs you like and there's even takeout.google.

Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.

Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.

Then there's the lost-in-the-weeds, defect-riddled shitshow that is post-XP Windows.

Microsoft's #1 priority now is hounding the shit out of you to LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!

LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT! LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT! ...

Up yours, Microsoft. Nobody wants your stupid account; we have WAY too many already.

Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

"Google Buzz: Like Twitter, But With Bees"

"I've Got A Bad Feeling About This" Button

"The Third Time's The Button" Button

There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.

People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.

> ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently....

https://www.beyondthedial.com/post/seiko-history-daini-suwa-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johannaread/2021/05/05/the-sheb...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars,_Incorporated#Mars_Petcar...

Edit: looks like petsmart beat mars to the punch on chewy

On a side note, they also sponsor projects to help with and care for feral cats and stray dogs in Mexico.

There might be some decent people with good intentions at those companies, but it all seems like some white vest marketing to me.

And any pet owner will confirm that veterinarians make good money. So for MARS to get into that market seems like a smart move.

Normally, a cash-cow business would be a great thing to own. Unfortunately the accumulated cash plus (feared or actual) slowing of growth equal a big red flag.

It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.

Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.

It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.

It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.

I'm not saying Apple made the wrong choice to be reverse-acquired by NeXT, obviously, they've done pretty well. But an alternate universe where Apple acquired BeOS is well within the imagination.

Would a Be acquisition do anything about the hundreds of engineers fritting away at dead ends like Pippin, OpenDoc and NewtonOS? Would it have stopped Apple from selling awful flawed hardware like the Power Macintosh 5000 and 6000 series? Unlikely. It's easy to forget just how ridiculous the Apple Computer of 1996 was. It was a company destined to — and deserved to — be consigned to the history books.

As valuable as the NeXT technology was to Apple, its importance is utterly dwarfed by the actions of Steve Jobs to rip away at the junk and rebuild the company in every sense of the word.

So true. Even though the market share of NeXTStep never got very high, it was a robust, battle-tested operating system that ran on multiple processor architectures with real software like FreeHand and Lotus Improv, an amazing spreadsheet for the time that would hold up pretty well today.

And interestingly enough, one of the main BeOS guys ended up at Apple and worked on APFS.

By comparison, NeXTStep was quite polished, certainly by the time it was available for x86, which is when I used it.

Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.

But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.

NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.

Yes indeed it was. I ran OS X in beta on a G4 for a year as my main OS. It was that innovative and great. Like magically having the “Linux on the desktop” dream come true overnight.

It was clunky and slow at the time but it was so awesome it hardly mattered.

When 2007 rolled around, broadband internet was widely available; search, mapping, social media had caught on. People were ready to take the internet with them in their pocket.

But it's also the only way to move the area forward.

The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard).

AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/12/dont-leave-your-meta-quest...

Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry.

That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians.

Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it.

I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.

It went over to Sony and is now at Magix.

The problem is largely the entire concept of SaaS, but some stronger anti-trust anti-monopoly laws couldn't hurt either.

Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here.

I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.

Reminds me of the early days when pro Mac software was well designed and reasonably priced; not the bloatware we get from Adobe and Microsoft today, for example.

Affinity Photo is also on the same level as PS, I don’t know about “surpassed” but Adobe is no longer the clear leader.

Davinci Resolve is, for my use case, just as good as Premiere and Afx.

It's also free.

I wish gimp was as good as Ps.

In my opinion Capture One best features are:

1) image and color quality 2) tethering capabilities 3) workflow customization and optimization

Which is sad because the software in general is a lot better than Lightroom, but your first point just isn’t true and that should be the primary thing to get right in a raw processor. Also, don’t conflate over sharpening and extra saturation for better quality (C1 defaults)

It's basically Coke versus Pepsi.

So, in double-blind tests, most people prefer the 'Pepsi' analogue, but when they know or think they know which one is the 'Coke' analogue, the choose that one?

. o O ( I don't really know which is the Pepsi and which is the Coke, in this matchup. )

I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma?

I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...

I think a big part of it is exactly that, that Figma's value proposition as a subscription was always clear from the beginning, that it's not just a design tool but a real-time, collaborative design environment. Sketch was always the better choice for solo, side-project work, because it was a one-off purchase with no need for a cloud component (its more recent direction to try to become a cloud-first service has unfortunately only served to highlight its shortcomings versus Figma).

Creative Suite never had a value proposition as a subscription apart from becoming a predictable cost center for businesses. Tacking on an inferior version of Dropbox, making the whole suite subscription-only, and calling it Creative Cloud did a pretty decent job of alienating those who didn't fall into that "predictable cost center" market.

Because that's not the same as a bait-and-switch, and because they provided value to subscribers in the form of continuous innovation.

I still use Lightroom 6, the last standalone version, so I haven’t found anything else with such good combination of library organisation & editing. But no way I’ll ever pay a monthly subscription for the current, slightly better version or the less capable cloud version.

And the cloud version of LR does offer cool features if you use them. I just need my iPad now when traveling. Can proof and start edits right there, then continue on the computer. I pull my images onto the iPad and let the cloud sync and back them up.

The only system that might be able to replace the workflow I currently use is Apple Photos, but it doesn't deal that well with RAWs and editing outside of the Photos.app.

I mostly did photography while travelling and Covid killed that the last two years, but I still had to pay Adobe.

Doesn't Figma have a free tier? That changes everything.

Does it? To me, that just says "Locking my data in a platform that can suddenly decide to charge me for functionality."

Note that Microsoft now has two controls on your digital identity. Login with Office365 and Login with Github.

If they pull a Google and disconnect you, you're in a world of hurt if you don't have otherwise.

Tech folks should have never allowed GitHub to become the monopoly it did.

Then subscription subsistence reigned supreme and now I avoid Adobe products like the plague.

Happily using DxO PhotoLab while I continue to avoid a Lightroom subscription.

Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.

I sometimes sit and weigh out which one of them does more evil to stop innovation in the “digital creativity” space in the name of monopolistic greed.

So far I think Adobe is winning because their products are more average consumer facing. But Autodesk sure seems to be racing to the bottom with its complete monopoly on 3D everything.

Both are evil… I hate both of them.

To be fair, Autodesk hasn't gone full spyware like Adobe. Otherwise, they're similarly poor stewards of industry "standard" software.

I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.

Only because they killed Freehand.

Dishonest, expensive, slow.

I think the concern has definitely gone to an anti-trust level. Adobe packages Lightroom for free with Photoshop, probably with Capture One directly in their sights. Anti-trust definitely needs a reinvigoration.

It’s a scummy tactic but it must pay if companies keep doing it. I suspect it preys mostly on the vulnerable less-tech-savvy users.

It's so stupid too, I'm happy paying subscriptions for things and happy paying a fair price but being tricked into doing it - never again, Adobe. They target their own customers with it to scrape a few more dollars into the current quarter, I guess. Probably some executive bonus targets or something.

Shame that I've managed to avoid the most aggressive dark patterns used by scammers and shady practioners. The one that got me was from a $150B company.

And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.

This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.

- It was rather annoying I had to check & double-check that I was only paying for 30 days and not getting ensnared in the annual plan with monthly payments & a big cancellation fee. Next time I need a vector editor, I'll just buy one from the app store.

I hate this level of sneaky trash “gotcha” behaviour…

To top it off, you just know it must make them a lot of money and they know there’s no other game in town, so screw us users, am I right?

Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of. But they're always missing one thing or another. Either:

1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only)

2. they don't go far enough with the vector editing capabilities (e.g. Fireworks allows you to apply arbitrary gradients/textures/other image assets as the stroke and fill of vector shapes)

3. they don't go far enough with the non-destructiveness (e.g. Fireworks applies filter-effects to both vector and raster layers, as non-destructive "filter layers" bound to a parent layer — effectively "functional lenses" for images; can edit the base layer "underneath" these transformation layers, and see the transformed output change as a result. Of course, you can always "flatten" the transformations into the layer, to then edit the post-transformed version of the layer. Though IMHO this could be taken even further, with "brush modifications" being just another kind of transformation layer!)

4. they use project file formats that consist of entire directory bundles, or file formats opaque to the OS preview mechanism. Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file; and every OS knows how to preview PNG files. (And, if you didn't care about the project, you could just treat the PNG file as a PNG file, putting it through ImageMagick or MSPaint or whatever, which would strip the optional chunks, thus "exporting" the project to PNG without needing the program that created it!)

And I get that the pixel-perfect design and slicing from the Fireworks era isn’t as useful in today’s world of responsive design and multiple screen sizes and variable screen densities, where CSS and JavaScript plays a much larger role, but I still wish we had a successor.

Because as you said, although most apps now do the hybrid vector/faster thing, nothing really matches what we had with Fireworks.

RIP Macromedia.

Sorry for my laziness to look it up but could you explain "Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file" ?

What happened with Macromedia was tragic.

I loved Fireworks, but it had far too many quirks that weren't improved, and when I discovered Sketch I was amazed how many thing that did bother me a lot in Fireworks were made just right in Sketch.

Also, our company credit card got replaced, and the process of updating the card and re-activating Creative Cloud took two weeks. It got canceled August 29 and only yesterday, September 14, was I able to launch Illustrator without a nag window. I hate Adobe.

With the next computer for half a year it was always this queasy, i should probably install illustrator now, but once I do I can never go back. Maybe I can hold out another few weeks. This is for a corporate paid for version that would make my work easier. Eventually I buckled and it ruined another computer.

10 years free though!

For me, it was… Atlassian buying HipChat Salesforce buying Tableau Salesforce buying Slack Microsoft buying GitHub (sort of) Alteryx buying Trifacta Oracle buying Cerner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Sun_Microsystem...

Has more real value ever been destroyed in the service of paper value?

Arguably yes, though I am including DEC in this equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisition_by_Hewlett-...

But if you’re looking at lost value, AOL buying TimeWarner (and the Sun parts of Netscape).

They’ve added a lot of “social media” functions like feeds and stuff.

I like what they’ve done with Actions though, that’s neat.

I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).

> Microsoft buying Github

This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.

Even their new public roadmap shows little of significance, it might as well be in maintenance mode.

Simplicity is so hard to achieve with design and Figma has done a great job striking the balance with feature set and simplicity. All the while delivering a super responsive platform.

They also released quarterly earnings today, but those beat the market’s expectations. What’s going on?

[0] market cap = 144B * 17% = 26B

Also this is being reacted too negatively, they are paying a HUGE price for a company that only has a AAR of 400 million a year.

It would need to be much, much more than 400 million to justify the purchase, and I'm not sure numbers of that size will ever materialize.

Another way to look at it is, what amount of investment would Adobe need to make to bring equivalent functionality in-house. Certainly less than 20 billion, by an order of magnitude at least. But then you have to wait, and manage with inspiration and dedication, and possibly fail. Not for the faint of heart.

Also just a horrible and desperate play.

My guess is because, given the current market, you don't really need to spent money acquiring potential competitors. As rate hikes continue (and likely will for the foreseeable future) I suspect many of the non-ipo's non-profitable startups will just die on the vine. No reason to spend $20 Billion to make sure they're not a threat, this isn't 2018.

0.https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE

Can't wait for the dominance of Photoshop to be ended by gimp and ffmpeg, I've found that they work fairly well for whatever editing I need. Maybe open source variety of Figma also exist?

Hah, good joke, I've been hearing it for years now.

Progress comes in bits and pieces, maybe gimp isn't it, just like GNU Hurd continues to suck, but something will be there eventually.

and tbf I'm finding ffmpeg very efficient for the kind of editing that I do, and I barely scrape the surface.

> the stasis in their … ui

I look for that in products I use a lot over long periods of time. I can’t stand when companies are constantly

> reworking ui just for the craft of it

An example was Microsoft threatening to cancel HP’s Windows license if they bundled Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer back in the browser war days.

Never had an issue with this tbh, it's always very easy. Manage account > cancel plan.

Hell, if you subscribe but then cancel within the same day, they give you a full refund. I've abused this a few times if I just need to do something quick - sub, use it for a few hours, cancel, and it doesn't cost me anything.

Then on the support call they will straight up pretend that none of their systems work in order to stop you from cancelling.

They do offer you things, but those things tend to be free months. Not random stuff you won't care about.

So apparently service is only good for some people.

And dont get me started about the 400 USD fee I had to pay to get out that I had not at all been informed about.

The only time you can freely modify your subscription is one month before your renewal date.

It's borderline illegal!

Presumably the current arrangement is some kind of creative accounting exercise though, and such a pro-customer policy might blow it up.

What you just have done is eliminate the monthly price. There can never be an annual contract anymore. That seems beyond silly. Is it really Adobe's fault for you trying to either be sneaky or simply malicious?

0. https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/creative-cloud-...

PS I just remembered that I forgot to cancel the subscription and they want to charge me 40 quid for the rest of the year. I even had a reminder set, but I missed it. So annoying.

Due diligence? Don't get into adobe without an adequate escape plan.

..."but I missed it".

Given the amount of information regarding adobe being a bunch of cntz over the last many years, you got anyone you actually want to blame?

And £40? You got a write-off procedure?

I was asking for advice, so I’m a bit confused about your comment.

I’ve been using them since photoshop 5 and generally had a positive opinion for most of that time. I learned about the whole annual sub/weekly payments issue last year.

Come to think of it, I do blame them for dark UX and making the process unnecessarily difficult (which has worked in my case perfectly).

Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.

> Says it’s a niche product not worth $20B

You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease of use is phenomenal. The collaboration capabilities are perfectly integrated. Even developers use it and love it.

They have taken the market by storm. And it’s a huge market.

You don’t seem to be part of that target market, and that’s fine. But saying Figma joining Adobe is a plus just shows how little you know about Figma and the web design world in general.

Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.

Limited reach is probably the last way to describe Figma. It's just an awareness thing, which is totally fine.

Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.

Hilariously bad take. Figma has very strong adoption. Lacking the same scale as Adobe doesn't mean it has bad adoption.