Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

We are working to compete with Adobe (well not them specifically), less trying to beat them on feature count (nobody would), more taking the things that Photoshop is overkill for and making it easier/repeatable.

Competitors always seem to focus on a 'canvas' paradigm rather than what people are actually trying to get done, such as cropping to the same dimensions for web over and over again, or in your case stitching videos (sorry we don't support video yet).

We are still pretty early stage but the feedback has been great.

https://beta.laazy.io

Bitmap graphics: Paint.NET . Yeah, Windows, but it works quite well. IIRC, I've read that, at least at one point, it ran under Wine. KDE's Krita just hit 4.0 . I haven't used it, but there are lots of nice comments about it floating around. In the Linux world, there's also Pinta that I've used a few times. On Ubuntu 16.04, out of the default repositories, it complains about this or that missing or not being signed/blessed/something -- or did, last I used it. But it works ok, at least for the quick and dirty tasks I had at hand at that time.

Vector graphics: Inkscape

Adobe support is, in my experience, truly horrible. I once spent a cumulative 7.5 hours on support calls before I finally got a front line call center employee to go back to their supervisor, after being given the wrong answer once, and prod them into paying attention and looking further and, lo and behold, generating the correct legacy license code I -- rather, the person I was helping -- was entitled to as an owner/licensee of the full-blown Creative Suite.

Basically, I knew more than the support supervisor about this problem. I just had to find someone in support with the interest and guts to push their supervisor to actually pay attention and execute the solution.

7.5 hours. For what should have been one 10 minute support call.

After that, I vowed that as for myself, at least, Adobe would never get another dime from me.

I'm one of those sad dorks who bought into CorelDraw back in the late 90s. Yes, their packaging was tacky; yes, they marketed themselves poorly; yes, a dozen cd-roms full of shitty clip art and knock-off fonts was a poor way to court designers. Behind all that was a massively superior (to Illustrator) vector art software, and a bitmap editor that was easily a peer to Photoshop. Watching "Creative Suite" (I mean Cloud) features to finally catch up to Corel 1998 in 2015 has been excruciating.

Look at how Illustrator even today doesn't use shift-clicks consistently with either Mac or Windows; it works like an app from thirty years ago, because it is a 30-year-old app.

Artists learn a tool, and are more interested in what they can do with that tool than how the tool works. Thus, they have a uniquely poor ability to adapt. You can see that with the transition of film photographers to digital. Also 3D guys: I have a neighbor who was an animator in the eighties, he did a bunch of those animated logos for NBC and HBO and MTV (with physically carved models and fancy camera tricks); he's trying like hell to adapt to software, but he seems to be about a decade late to wrap his head around it.

That's fair. Did you check out "Media Composer | First"? I think that's free

If your content makes you significant money, you'll be willing to invest/pay. Return from even one piece of content will typically very comfortably pay off software pricing. My wife and her business partners run a completely bootstrapped startup and they do pay (often others rather than make content themselves) for wherever is critical for revenue generation.

If your content doesn't generate revenue or revenue generating leads, you have a hobby and need to decide whether to invest in the hobby.

Edit: in my last trip to China, I actually saw the mushrooming "mobile live video streaming influencer" industry and looking at their equipment (portable large battery powered klieg lights, audio gear etc.), it's pretty clear the influencers were investing.