Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#51

Post by jimmiejams » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #46

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…

I used to work with a designer who lived and breathed CorelDraw. She could do everything she needed to in it, and preferred it over Photoshop. The rest of the designers used Photoshop and there was always some pressure for her to switch, but she was productive and that's all that really mattered. She used to have a few digs at them about how quick it was to do something (or even possible), but all in good fun.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#52

Post by jpobst » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 4:02 AM UTC

Ultimately there is very little consumer grade software anymore because modern consumers won't pay for software.

The only people who pay for software are enterprises and they aren't going to skimp a few hundred dollars on software that makes their $X0,000 creative workers X% less productive.

In this space there is basically Pixelmator and Affinity trying to eke out enough sales to keep their developers paid.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#53

Post by kyriakos » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 4:49 AM UTC

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #46

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…

I still feel like curve editing, point selection on Corel Draw is more intuitive than Illustrator. Corel got a lot of things right but didn't manage to get its products seriously considered by the publishing industry.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#54

Post by kyriakos » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

There's a lot more competition in the photography industry. Adobe has lightroom but there's a trend now for photographers jumping into Capture One. Then there's dxo optics, darktable and for the less high end market Acdsee.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#55

Post by pvinis » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

I use to work for a company making an InDesign alternative. It's pagestrip.com. Feel free to try it out!

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#56

Post by y_molodtsov » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 5:22 AM UTC

pacavaca wrote: post #36

ReverseCold wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac quite a few people use Final Cut. Davinci Resolve is also getting better over time. Some people say it's already good enough for them to use daily, I think it's too buggy.

Final Cut is like $300 - a price of a new GoPro. Btw, I think that GoPro could be a great company to compete in the video-editing market. They already have a wide audience, and they just have to make their Quick editor more feature rich, while keeping it simple enough for average user. They also have money and are in desperate need of settling on a software market...

They actually have their own video editing app, but I can’t say it could compete with FinalCut.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#57

Post by y_molodtsov » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

pacavaca wrote: post #38

sfifs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because sufficient number of non professionals typically won't pay an amount of money that pays for a top notch development team. So in the non professional market, you have labors of love like GIMP and DarkTable

Right, but what about those "indie" content creators, popping up everywhere these days: YouTubers, Instagrammers, independent musicians and clip-makers, poor startup founders, needing to create a 1-minute marketing video twice a year... All those, I think, would spare $50-$100 for a good piece of software but not more than that. And if someone would analyze how they use professional products, I'm sure, it would conve…

Top Youtubers already use RED cameras, they’re ok with spending money :)

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#58

Post by y_molodtsov » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

mhmiles wrote: post #26

omarchowdhury wrote: post #15

For UX/UI design, there's Sketch and Figma.

Was looking for this. I don’t think competition comes as a 100% feature complete alternative but rather as a splintering into more specialized tools.

Sketch and Figma are actually auite similar from PS, they were adapted for the particular task and simplified it, that’s why designers love it. Hard to do something like that fot the general application.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#59

Post by jinushaun » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

pacavaca wrote: post #43

panic wrote: post #40

> I was also looking for a simple software to stitch together my GoPro videos but was left out with either free iMovie/Quick, which are too basic or a super-expensive Premiere. It sounds like your real question is, why isn't anyone making free or inexpensive tools with features like Premiere, so I don't have to pay for it? That's the problem -- everybody wants nice software but nobody's willing to pay what it would a…

Not really. My point was that there's a lot of space between MS Paint and Photoshop (iMovie and Premiere), etc, and there seem to be enough people, willing to pay half price for the half of features. I'm not saying I want it for free, all I'm saying is that $500/year (creative suite price) is way too much for occasional picture/video editing.

Frustratingly that mythical video editing app you’re looking for was actually a previous version of iMovie. Apple crippled iMovie with the release of iMovie 08, which removed a bunch of previous features and workflows in an effort to make it easier to post videos to YouTube. Apple made it easier to create simple videos, but incredibly difficult to make anything slightly more complicated. Editing clips synced to music became a frustrating game of Tower of Hanoi.

I thought there would be hope with switching to FCP, but then they did the same thing in 2011 with FCP X.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#60

Post by kelsolaar » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

I guess it depends which market you are talking about, Adobe Photoshop usage in the VFX and Game industries have plummeted. Texturing is done using The Foundry Mari or Allegorithmic Substance Painter. After Effect is still used for commercials but most of the high-end compositing work is done with The Foundry Nuke. As far as editing goes, Davinci Resolve is an amazing piece of software, I highly recommend it given it is free.