I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
While I don't use Photoshop I'd assume that logic holds even stronger - if you know how to use Photoshop you're going to ask for that rather than a tool you don't know how to use.
As a thought experiment: if Photoshop was means tested and free to anyone who couldn’t afford it, would that actually convert users when they had money?
Personally, I find the macOS behavior really irritating and unintuitive, but thankfully there are plenty of apps out there that solve this issue so it's not really a problem.
MacOS on the other hand not really. It is better/acceptable after I installed some Plugins. But I still wish Linux was fully supported (and my company would allow it). Even Windows would be an upgrade currently for me.
As a long time mac user I am probably unaware of neat stuff from windows.
The key to bring back the last window I looked at should not change depending on whether the app name happens to be different.
I mean, I’d argue that the way Windows does it is illogical and confusing, and if I used Windows regularly I’d want a plugin to make window switching work the way it does on MacOS, which I find far more convenient. But that doesn’t make the way Windows does it objectively wrong, and it wouldn’t justify my irritation at the OS not working the way I would prefer it to.
All of the issues you’ve described are limited to your particular use case, and as has been pointed out by myself and others, are easily solvable with a relatively inexpensive program. So your entire argument really boils down to “I don’t like the way MacOS does something by default, but fortunately it’s an easy and cheap fix so it’s not really a huge deal”.
…yes, and?
Somebody was asking for an example of the sort of plugin someone might want to install, I provided an example. There was no argument being had, no claims that OSX is objectively wrong for doing things that way, just a pile-on of people not reading the context.
You could have just said, “I don’t like the way MacOS does X, and here’s the plugin to use to change it so it does Y.” Instead, you went on a long-winded screed about why your view was obviously the correct one, while providing no solution to the problem (and implying that there was no obvious solution, because you “run into this problem constantly”) and strongly implicating that anyone who dared to suggest otherwise was clearly wrong.
And then you wonder why people thought you were being argumentative.
I bound it to Option + tab though, more intuitive to me.
Scenario: I'm in a terminal doing something, and I have a second window I'm switching back and forth between that contains the man page for a command. In isolation, I haven't given you enough information to tell whether I should be pressing opt-tab or cmd-tilde to swap windows: maybe the man page is in a browser, or maybe it's in a second terminal.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an editor and some reference document in another window; you can't tell which key I should press to swap without knowing if I'm looking at the document in another editor instance or a browser window.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between a terminal and some reference document from a cloud provider. You can't determine which key to press to swap without knowing if I'm ssh'd in a terminal or using a web-based cloud terminal.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an image editor and a client's low-resolution logo they emailed me. You can't determine which key to press to swap without knowing if I'm looking at the reference image in another image editor window or a browser.
I run into this constantly.
I didn’t reply to the wrong comment, I was just trying to be helpful.
This OS behavior has seemed second nature to me ever since browsers implemented tabs. Like in each of your described scenarios I usually forget which browser tab is in the foreground when I switch, I will have to Ctrl+tab until I find the relevant one. It will stay on top once I do though.
That is what MacOS does; the window of an app you had in focus last will stay on top of the stack. It makes intuitive sense to me personally but I agree it does make finding stuff a little onerous.
In your scenarios, you know which applications you have your relevant documents opened in so once you have them on top switching is easy. But again, I understand that a decade of muscle memory and using a different paradigm will make this behavior infuriating.
[0] https://superuser.com/questions/193922/is-there-any-program-...
This is a great formulation of an annoyance that I've had for 10 years but hadn't put into words.
If you happen to use virtual desktops / "spaces" or whatever macos calls them these days, it's annoying that the default cmd-tab switcher will switch to apps that have no windows on the current workspace. I know, that's part of Mac's app model and it is self-consistent (especially since even if you don't use virtual desktops, you can still have an app running with no open windows, switch to it and usually cmd-N to get a new window) and that it's at odds with Windows's model (where usually closing the last window of a program closes the program).
A sibling comment suggested Witch to get app-agnostic window-switching, I haven't tried Witch but you can do almost all things with Hammerspoon, including window-switching. I cribbed from a bunch of other peoples' configs and made a simple switcher: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/ef8532c3fa3304336ffb0198163... . I think it's worth investing in learning Hammerspoon because of the sheer amount of things that you can integrate.
# AltTab brings back the ability to switch to specific windows. MacOS is still annoying here because it brings -all- instances of the program in foreground (overlapping a Firefox instance in wanted to look something up for example). Feels like MacOS is designed mainly for one screen. I have about 4x that size on my ultrawide. Still this Plugin helps a lot.
# Commander one is a better file manager for me
# Shottr makes taking screenshots easy and actually works with ultra widescreens
# UnnaturalScrollWheels makes the scroll function of my mouse nice again. Personal preference oc but MacOS has no option to invert the scroll behavior.
In general I encountered quite some bugs in MacOS. I was disappointed tbh because I came back after many years of Windows and Linux. Macs and MacOS are build in the same house and should "fit together".
A selection: - System settings search broken. Does not navigate to item - Finder sometimes does not find programs (which are found 2 min later without a problem) - Crash of MacOS after sleep. The automatic recovery is good however. - Selecting to only share a window (in Teams for example) shares sometimes more than that window. This can reveal sensitive information
My current laptop was about 750$ , has a 8845HS and I added a 4TB SSD for 200$.
If I wanted to do the same thing with a Mac I'd be spending over 3k.
I actually have a M1 Air, but Apple decided soldering SSDs would be a good idea.
Dualboot Linux and Windows for the best experience...
Right, "when a consumer can afford to."
Sure. But most high-income consumers value many of the perks that Apple products provide.
I can actually use a MacBook Air on my lap without endangering my ability to have little scarface_74’s
Also a “laptop” computer that doesn’t fry your reproductive organs when working on your lap is an obvious metric.
I'm still trying to figure out the reproductive organ bit. It sounds like an issue for people who use their computer in awfully unergonomic postures, particularly since most computers radiate heat towards the back rather than the front.
Seriously honest question as someone not too deep in the x86 ecosystem anymore. Which of these that are listed as having the best battery life would be comparable in performance to the latest MacBook Airs?
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-battery-life-laptops
The tradeoff use to be performance or battery life.
So instead of being able to upgrade to a 8TB in a few years when the prices come down, I can just throw out my 3K Mac and buy a new one. Only 5k for the 8TB Mac.
I make music and I'm getting into photography and film making. I prefer more space over being having to carry around an external SSD with me
I also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on Windows. If I want to play some COD or Tony Hawk HD, that's very well supported.
Not really going to work on a Mac.
Macs do have a much more premium feel to them, but I've had great experiences with cheap laptops. Even if I drop it, shucks, I'm out 750$, not 3k.
Not to mention that feeling premium doesn't mean that it is more durable. I used to joke that those cheap plastic bodies found on cheap products did a much better job of protecting a device from the shock of a fall than the glass and metal bodies of premium feeling products.
And while my experience with Macs is dated, I had an optical drive in one that refused to accept disks because there was a minor bend in the case. That machine never suffered from a fall, though it was likely a result of how I stuffed the machine into my book bag.
Mac buyers fall into two groups: those who don't need that upgrade (most consumers) and those who can afford to spec it up at the beginning, cost be damned. That's what OP meant by "when the consumer can afford to."
> also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on Windows
100%. I don't think Apple has meaningfully contested this space.
I'd just prefer to save my money and get significantly more storage.
I will miss Logic though...
Or something cloudy, though not necessarily iCloud Drive.
The rest of your points are all valid, but for photography storage purposes you can just use SD cards. They take up virtually no space, and MBPs (since at least M1 gen) have an SD card slot built-in.
If I had to use a Mac, I guess I'd change my workflow a bit.
Compatibility for many programs people care about is a lot better on Windows than on Mac (or Linux). That has improved a lot in recent years, of course. Especially for games.
Linux has great compatibility for lots of hardware, but Windows is still better supported. Mac has almost non-existent compatibility for hardware: you need to buy an Apple branded device to run Apple's operating system. For peripherals Windows has probably the best compatibility list, but Linux can often be better for very old stuff. Mac's record is spotty at best.
Not only an Apple device but a recent Apple device. I have a 2014 RMBP that works flawlessly. I haven’t been able to install MacOS on it for a couple of years now.
They learned from XP/7 that they'll never recoup it though licenses so now its ads and subscription upsells for everybody.
Knock yourself out!
I like to procrastinate just as much as the next guy, but procrastinating over trying out a different search engine is a bit too much even for me.
Are they legit legit? Or is this just because it's trivially easy to get a "legit" OEM license for free via Microsoft Activation Scripts?
i am unfamiliar with windows activation, does it activate once only, meaning that if you tried to reinstall on the same machine, you can't reuse the same license?
Netflix also famously went this route, allowing rampant password sharing and then deciding "Hey, we want to get paid!" On one hand I don't have a problem with companies wanting to get paid for what they produce, but on the other, given that allowing the piracy is a deliberate decision they made from the get-go, I don't have a problem telling them to get bent once they decide "Time for profits! Enshittification it is..."
That said, this strategy is surefire when it comes to consumer products like Windows. Consumers will stick with what thye are comfortable with. The Network Effect. It's a huge gamble for professional tools like Adobe, and they are somewhat lucky there wasn't a timeline where GIMP un-GIMPED itself, nor where Krita and other modern competitors didn't get adopted faster. There's money at stake, so professionals can and will learn new tools if the tools bite them.
(Lest you think I am joking, have a look at the 'MoviePass economy.')
It’s like when someone offers to sell you a product weighed in grams, you can’t just say ‘ah yes, the drug dealer measurement system’ and dismiss their business out of hand.
Because I don’t think the moral issue people have with drug dealers is that they take a deliberately easy going attitude to theft of their merchandise and allow others to profit from selling it to a territory, only to later on increase their prices.
See also how 'picking the low hanging fruit first' would get you fired from any picking gig: the fruit higher up the plant tends to ripen first. So that's what you pick first.
There's lots of other funny (business) metaphors going wrong.
See also how a 'quantum leap' is the smallest possible change possible, not something big and amazing.
However, I think it is a pretty common occurrence that first timers often get their first hit from friends or even co-workers.
(there's nothing wrong with it other than it being a bit of a generic tangent, but I'm trying to prune the top-heavy subthreads)
Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.
I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).
When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but you've been able to buy each major release outright for ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)
I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that subscriptions are the only way now.
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
I wish they'd release a Mac version, because that was actually my favorite video editor on Windows. It would be really great if they made a Linux version but I'm not holding my breath for that.
If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the command line was another route into modern-day build pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia division with it.
Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the walled garden of the web — closed source, proprietary and a perennial security nightmare — and the community owes Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.
I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is not. But the web is not, and should never have been, reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.
Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.
Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway
Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
Safari barely ran on the first gen iPhone. If you scrolled too fast, it would display a checkerbox while the rendering caught up. It didn’t even have enough memory to have a background image on your Home Screen.
When Flash finally came to mobile in 2010 on Android, it required 1Gb RAM and 1Ghz processor and it barely ran. I had an HTC that met those specs. The first iPhone that met those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Adobe was always over promising and under delivering on Flash for mobile to the point where the Motorola tablet that advertised flash support didn’t ship with it and embarrassingly enough, you couldn’t even view the Xoom’s home page on the web with the tablet because it required Flash.
Flash was a security nightmare
What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.
Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.
I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.
I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.
It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.
And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.
It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.
Photoshop was never $1500 either. CS6 was $700. The design standard CS6 suite was $1300.
Maybe hunt for artists that use the reasonably priced Clip Studio Paint instead? It's pretty popular among manga and the like artists anyways.
Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody else.
I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be set by state actors. But they should only make them available, not mandate them into private actors.
They already do that. That's not the problem.
If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-only features, then no other art program can open the source material. Period.
At best you can get approximations of the original Photoshop render if you open the image in another program. But generally what you get is garbage if it's not a recent version of Photoshop.
The point of getting the Photoshop original with the layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of the layers and have it re-render a result that is better for what I need. Something that is difficult or impossible if I just have a JPEG.
And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the tools not being as good.
Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect them to be happy or productive.
You mean the thing that every single company does for their work for hire?
When a developer doesn't know, they go after another developer. (And they should restrict the number of constraints to what is really important, but almost no company does that.)
And companies that want programmers who write, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap developers, and would be better off porting their software to something more modern. I did some work on a Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time. They couldn't possibly pay me enough.
But that's my point: Just like they would get crap developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try to work with non-Adobe artists.
- Paint is not only free but built-in
- Paint.net is free and covers most of what I'd need to do
- GIMP is free. Cumbersome, but if I need to do any batch operations that's when I bring out a full suite.
If I only need to do a quick edit for some hobby thing, I'm not frought for options.
>but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists
So you are a professional? If you have artists at your beck and call and it's not a forboding deadline, I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.
There's definitely a debate to be had about proprietary file formats (I work in games, so I completely understand that with its 3d equivalent that is the FBX format... thankfully there are very slow moves to cast that away), but I'm not sure I have a good solution. I don't necessarily think a company should be forced to open source/spec its own tooling.
Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?
The point would be that sometimes it takes 4-5 turnarounds with an artist to get something exactly right. Something that I, as a non-artist but skilled app user, can do in less time it takes to explain what I need to the artist a single time. So it's about saving my time and not having to pay for hours of artist time for something I can do in 10 minutes.
What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them. That's what it comes down to. I'm not saying they should be forced to do anything. Just that I don't like what they're doing, and therefore end up having to work around their software rather than using it.
I have a license for the last one they offered for a fixed cost; bought it for a steep discount when the new licenses were the Next Big Thing. But they won't get any more of my money until they offer the software at a reasonable price tier.
Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting professional artists working on complex assets and not a grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple" probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for much worse quality.
>What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them.
I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a smooth migration, especially when working as a team.
It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.
In fact, it's in games that the artists, especially when working with 3d, had the hardest time getting the precise kinds of changes that I would need.
But even in 2d, if they, say, created a sprite, but then left a few pixels non-100%-transparent in the corners of the image, I could ask them to go find those pixels and erase them...or I could do it myself.
And if they don't get them completely erased, then there will still be artifacts on the screen and the texture atlas packing will be screwed up.
Yeah. I've been doing this for a long time.
And no, I don't have much hope of getting artists to migrate. I'm just tilting at windmills.
For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.
I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.
Another one I don’t know: can you embed a gimp file into a layout editor? A common workflow is to embed a photoshop file into an indesign file; you can then edit your photoshop file and have your indesign file updating automatically. This is a common workflow in several adobe products, eg I believe after effects sequence embedded into a Premiere timeline is possible/common.
You sure can. I'm not even an artist and that's the one part of GIMP I can speak for. It has its own Python library, so almost anything you can do in editor you can do programmatically, but I made a few scripts for batch processing an entire album of images.
(documentation is about as awkard as the GUI, though. You will eventually find what you need after putting in 3-5x more effort than what should have been necessary, but it's somewhere in the docs)
Yeah but they’re getting all the money from everyone else.
Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won’t give them money, good riddance.
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
Ah yes, the google style of offerings.
LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
I dont know about that, Ive made many songs in Adobe Flash in my time! /s
But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you.
But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision.
Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
I was answering the hypothetical example of one company having this magic button. With the rest of the world operating as normal.
If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly different question.
You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
> The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
> Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the stock market is really bad at evaluating business decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
Especially if you are living in a world where everyone else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees for cheap and just run a steady ship!
Another important consideration: at some level of abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a company might just mean that the old equity (another legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of the people working there, nor does it break any of the machinery and hardware.
So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of other companies willing to fill their former niche.
I can tell you that many people would choose the first.
Yet, that time is frequently cited as the golden age that people harken back to.
You don't need a layoff to migrate a product into minimum maintenance.
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.
After all, money is nothing else but a token of work. The more money you have, the more work you can make other people do.
I think you're reaching. The things you're talking about have physical impacts. You can't run computers without building chips, developing power systems, and so on. Yes, things of value need not be inherently physical but there are no things that are not connected to the physical world in some form or another.
It's a me problem alright, but I'm in no way unique in refusing to put up with the mountain of grief that the Gimp UX is.
> I've been using it productively for photo editing and web design for two decades+.
I know Gimp must have its share of long term users but they're a miracle to me and I don't know what to say to that. I suppose it's good people reading these threads who are open to giving Gimp a go see there are users for whom it's working out.
I personally learned Paint Shop Pro first, after baby steps of Mac/MS Paint. Later on didn't find Photoshop particularly intuitive... although liked 3.0 on the Mac. It's even worse now according to professional friends.
I've used many others over the years and never had a problem with basic to medium features. They all work roughly the same—WIMP. Point, click.
Gimp works similarly to every other graphics program, so using it for common tasks is not hard. It's not "full of grief." If you can't do it, you either never learned how to use a GUI program properly[1], proceed by rote, or refuse to consult the manual for more specific tasks.
For one thing, it's a helluva lot easier to learn than Blender, which has no chronic troll posts that I've seen.
[1] Not uncommon in web times. The original Apple HIGs might help.
Blender being harder to learn has pretty much zero to do with how great or poor the experience of using it is. On top of missing the point, you're also missing the connection between the lack "troll posts" and what the user experience is like.
But since you're muttering to yourself about troll posts and how it's really just a skills issue, I might as well go and mutter to myself about how great Gimp could be if it had users who had standards instead of being chronic enablers who just cheerfully whistle through the wart fair it is.
I've had my yearly share of discussing Gimp I think. I'll just keep to my routine: see an update, install it in hopes of finding it has changed, and quit it ten minutes later kicking myself for being dumb enough to allow myself to hope.
I think the dark patterns here are garbage, but Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
Make a serious dent in their business and they will damn sure try. Typically with lawfare.
Is it common for people to upgrade LR or similar software every year?
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people
The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is and always has been a separate "more accessible" product. Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible to Adobe.
That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.
And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as
upgrading every year.
Lightroom upgrades cost about $80. According to the wiki page Adobe rents Lightroom for $10/mo. That upgrade would only get me eight months of access.
Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady. Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license, etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.
If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom with all of their licensing software and incur the cost of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.
Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook charged for their social network.
They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than Adobe has.
There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they lack greed.
I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-causality.
'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have good reasons?
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that determines how companies behave.
However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.
No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-causal point
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
is wrong.
So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.
How did we end up in situation were anyone would be paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of their position having combination of add network and popular search engine...
Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.
They usually gain market share based on merit. Over time, structural factors such as network effects allow them to grow the rent-seeking part of their income while the merit based part declines.
Rent-seeking is a very entrenched idea though. Even the tiniest bit of merit in the distant past is enough to justify renting out inherited land for instance.
It doesn't really apply to any SaaS.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/services-reven...
And they will need access to all of your data to provide those services.
Which doesn’t require any of your data.
There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device
If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
So why not just comment with exactly this?
Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500:
2003 -> 2013 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s...
2013 -> 2023 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s...
See the difference?
Thanks for providing the data. Sorry, I was on mobile, so had a harder time finding the numbers in a way that I can share.
> See the difference?
For anyone following at home, here's the important bit for the earlier period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.57. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.57.
And for the later period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.93. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.69.
Thanks!
Guess I’m a Toyota subscriber as in 10 years I’ll be buying a new Tacoma
For me I got a 14 for upgraded GPS and satellite, no plans for a 15. My dad is on a 12 and my mom a 10 and totally content. I think my brother has an 11. Most people I know don’t obsessively buy upgrades and those I know who do are actually split between Apple and android- and do it with other things too ie it’s the personality behind it not the company “tricking” them. Some ppl even do it with cars wanting the latest
Thank you Harvard Business School.
1. https://teknikveckan.se/det-krisar-hos-viaplay-over-25-proce...
2. See comments - https://twitter.com/ViaplaySportSE/status/180153322166384670...
3. https://omni.se/sparkade-vdn-jobbade-fem-manader-far-18-milj...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240118204920/https://www.fastc...
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog under the Experiments header.
Fortunately they fell into financial troubles before the deal became active.
They massively overpaid for showing all of the matches, to force everyone interested in football to get a subscription. But probably most people just watch it on tv, because "hey, why not, national team of x country (or our own team, for whom winning a match is a miracle) is playing, lets watch it". Not "I will happily pay tens of € each month to some company to watch stuff".
For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later
How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion
I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies
The most effective business is getting all the money on the table and making your client happy. Thusly the art of business, ripping off your client without pissing them off.
Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, unless you are deliberately underselling the market to gain share by sheer force of will. Likewise by selling wares higher than what they could have gone for, clients will just look elsewhere because you're just another one of many merchants.
Explain Costco then.
I've seen the same numbers in multiple articles state that 72% of Costco's profits came from the membership fee in a year that they saw record sales.
Reminds me of the "men only want one thing and it's disgusting" meme but with executives.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market.
However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum.
Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest.
This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas.
Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm.
Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents.
——
Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth.
PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the company with 50€ a month product can just buy them out.
If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done, computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes each year and bumping the cost by 5%.
There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
[1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY
The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
Hello, Autodesk
I just purchased affinity suite this year because I’m done with adobe for good now. I don’t see them doing anything to ever win me back as a customer
Compare that to the Affinity suite, which is an amazing collection of programs, especially for the price. They're currently running a sale where you can get everything for $83. If my daughter becomes interested in digital design, I'd be happy to spent that kind of money to encourage her. I'd be very hesitant to subscribe to the Adobe suite, even though that's what I use at work.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)
I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
When? Do you have any articles/videos showing the difference? I can’t find any.
The only major loss I’m aware of is when they left iPhotos and Aperture in the dust.
Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning, fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in performance. Like it became unusable.
So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with Sierra Photos on my one machine.
This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than a yearly subscription.
Bill per hour would be OK.
Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
Adobe does offer monthly subcriptions, but for individuals only.
But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time. This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it, but they wouldnt do it twice)
The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes commercial reality.
To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest of the year. And you’ll lose access to the products at the end of the month.
So unless you’re not even getting 50% of the subscription cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you’ve got a 30 day window a year from now where you can cancel without penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next year…
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud, via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you literally have zero flexibility and control.
Not really a reasonable run time for a career, though. What do you do after that?
Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the security folks will start whining about factories and shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and software older than most of us on this site). In fact, the security folks and the business folks align enough on it that professional software is force-feeding you updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make bespoke deals with OS vendors.
> Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software.
5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in some cases.
Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's that universally these days, newer versions of products are almost always inferior in terms of functionality, performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I have (and even worse, half of the software is now subscription-only).
That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your choices are the same as ever:
- Don't upgrade for as long as possible
- Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until replacements are found/made
- go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next schism.
There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and roll your own.
The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals remain the same so you're not starting from square one. Whatever new web stack is being used today is still probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery, which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription model way or thinking.
No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper here if you are in it for the long haul.
10 years down the line their DRM stops working because you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they take away your ability to reinstall it on another device because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and their online services don't support your old license. Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work until the ice age.
Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software you bought and paid for?
Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole unity fiasco?
I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user. Every single company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it because they think you can just opt out of it.
I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software, and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics professionals.
> Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to
Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
It's happened so many times before that we're wary when we see it happening again. Please read what I said before responding to me you absolute waste of time.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be distrustful. You're never going to be wrong, because you'll never take that risk and you'll effectively repel all people who don't like to be treated as if they were dishonest or be insulted at random. But what kind of people will you be left with?
also because users don't want that. I don't think any of us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest; that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark or stagnates into nothingness.
> People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of walking away wherever I can for companies that keep pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube, for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
>Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG, it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long buried "Do No Evil" motto.
Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for your own interests and be ready to jump.
>I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user.
I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a package I forgot about.
But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until then.
why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade? unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
Ugh, what an egregious misuse of public funds. Maybe they should also check the labels on the employees' clothes, in case of illegal knock-offs.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer basics. She said she went to this photography course and the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support guy for the whole family.
There was also a case of finding her a replacement for trial Office she got with her machine with - she was familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and it worked pretty well up until some document formatting issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice. I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow, and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some cracked version of Office.
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography course would be all about getting people trapped within Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each head he managed to catch.
Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity giving the example of the woman from my original comment, but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I suggested her.
---
While two examples may be that much, I do believe being committed to familiarizing itself with software in early stages makes the switch harder later.
I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments... That'd be really interesting stuff to read.
I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.
I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
Probably not unintentional.
That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.
[1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.
Lightroom is starting to get some HDR processing capabilities that are interesting to me, but that one feature by itself isn't currently worth paying Adobe's crazy subscription prices just to use a program that I otherwise don't enjoy.
This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.
SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.wir...
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
[I think you didn't mean 'except']
I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer I've used in the last 15 years.
If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because it's missing file/library management and layers.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
The primary bit of evidence to the BSA was/is from disgruntled employees "ratting" on their employer. Is that sufficient evidence of a crime to justify a warrant for any TLA to do an investigation? If not, that's the only way you're looking at my computers.
Again, laughing in their face would be my response.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/fortune_200_oracle_ja...
As covered here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639943
So this is not just a thing of the past, sadly.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
A perpetual license is not meaningfully distinct from ownership in the context of software - you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Your house/car get re-possessed if you stop making their loan payments since they are listed as collateral for the loan, that's different then you not owning them in the first place.
I don't need my builder's permission to add a sofa, paint the walls, or change the locks. But god help you if Adobe finds out that you've changed the DRM locks on the version of Photoshop that you "own".
> you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Depends on the license, ones like Unlicense or 0BSD try to opt out of the default copyrighted licensed state of released code.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.
I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
I'd be curious to hear what Preview messed up?
For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.
(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)
I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine is a little much tho.
The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of software that aren't hosted somewhere.
If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.
Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.
I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting the many millions he made aside.
First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
[1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation strongly affiliated with that industry.
if these individual users are deriving commercial revenue from the software, i dont see it as wrong to pursue revenue from them.
Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.