Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#1

Post by pacavaca » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

Adobe has sort of a monopoly on the creative tools market. Nobody seriously considers an alternative for their Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, etc, and for some people, these are truly the only products which can satisfy their sophisticated needs. However, there are more and more small (independent) creators of all kinds, who do not need all the uber features of the professional products but would rather appreciate an intuitive UI, cheaper price, and friendlier customer support. Every kid today is either a blogger, vlogger or web designer and it seems to me like quite a big market that would easily turn away from Adobe, had anyone created an alternative product with 40% of functionality that works flawlessly (!).

I recently had to interact with Adobe support, and my experience was quite terrible. 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. Both times I was wondering, how come there's only Adobe on the market, why nobody dares to compete with them. So, HN, what do you think, why?

P.S. I tried using Pixelmator (non-free), GIMP, OpenShot and a few more open-source editors - they don't stand the competition. On the other hand, I use and love Sketch, and would really appreciate Sketch-grade competitors for the above mentioned Adobe products.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#2

Post by billconan » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

I like photoshop and haven't found a good replacement. when muscle memory is built up, it's really difficult to learn and switch to a different tool.

I have been searching for photoshop alternatives. but so far I haven't found any. For me photoshop is too expensive.

I have even considered to implement my own (I only need a portion of the photoshop features)

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

is what I found recently, it looks nice, but I can't get used to it.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#3

Post by pacavaca » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:48 AM UTC

billconan wrote: post #2

I like photoshop and haven't found a good replacement. when muscle memory is built up, it's really difficult to learn and switch to a different tool. I have been searching for photoshop alternatives. but so far I haven't found any. For me photoshop is too expensive. I have even considered to implement my own (I only need a portion of the photoshop features) https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ is what I found recently,…

Wow, Affinity looks pretty capable, I think worth trying out. Still, no real alternative for video editing...

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#4

Post by smt88 » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:49 AM UTC

Adobe has tons of competitors, but they're not always obvious because the market doesn't perfectly overlap.

For example, I used to buy Photoshop and Dreamweaver to do web design for static sites. Now I use SquareSpace instead.

There are lots of niche products that chip away at Photoshop, including web-based alternatives that are less powerful but "good enough" and more portable.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#5

Post by acidburnNSA » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:51 AM UTC

For "developing" RAW images (Adobe Lightroom), it appears that the FOSS, Darktable [1], is a serious competitor. It has a full array of non-destructive editing features including extremely fancy parametric mask and blending effects. It also has responsive photo management (works great on at least 10s of GB), import, tagging, etc. They recently released their first Windows build.

[1] https://www.darktable.org/

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#6

Post by mietek » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

The competition has been assimilated.

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

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

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

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

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#7

Post by ivanstegic » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

We stopped using Photoshop and migrated to Sketch exclusively. New designers we interact with seem to be doing the same thing. One data point. YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#8

Post by starmftronajoll » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

Seems like the question would be to ask why nobody competes viably with Photoshop. Premiere is an odd example to single out — Avid and Final Cut, for instance, are full-featured and both have a substantial user base. The competition there is healthier than OP makes it out to be.

As for Photoshop, once it became the standard, it stayed that way by virtue of user inertia and the massive development resources it would take for a competitor to create a program in the same class. Photoshop is an extremely complex app and, on the whole, a very good one. It’s not without its frustrations, but nothing is.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#9

Post by wgerard » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

I think you kinda answered your own question:

> P.S. I tried using Pixelmator (non-free), GIMP, OpenShot and a few more open-source editors - they don't stand the competition.

It's really hard to do it right, and even if you do you're targeting just a single segment of the market (people who need more than iMovie but not everything that Premiere provides). I imagine more than a few people have looked into this and decided that isn't a good ROI for the amount of investment involved.

Also, don't forget that Adobe (used to, anyway, not sure if they still do) has really cheap student licenses so that aspiring designers/editors/etc. get hooked on their software and carry that preference over into their professional lives.

My guess is that anyone who really has a passion for this has a regular full-time job and works on something like GIMP in their free time.

Re: Ask HN: Why nobody competes with Adobe?

#10

Post by kradeelav » Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 1:59 AM UTC

I'm a designer that works both on an indie freelancer level and an agency/corporate level, so this feels apt for input!

Several reasons - you've got part of the answer right in that there are a ton of other smaller tools for the more specific sections of the market that can be broken apart and sectioned off. I personally deal with quite a bit of comics/illustration and there alone you have Corel Painter, OpenCanvas, PaintTool SAI, Manga Studio, Clip Studio, plus many of the newer ipad sketch programs that've popped up recently.

However - I think those markets get saturated and weakened too quickly by those newcomers that gain a foothold and then slowly start deteriorating due to lack of updates or shiny marketing. Photoshop gets underrated for sheer versatility in this case - it's less of a high priced transient brand (think Uber or BMW) and simply a functioning longstanding tool (a car, or a swiss army knife for that 'tool as a brand' metaphor) for so many kinds of design related issues that the ease of use is baked in. Software tends to have a maddening problem of quick degradation and a large slice of older designers tend to be very picky about their tools. Broke, too.

Additionally, for some of the larger corporations - there's lots of production chains that rely quite strongly on specific file formats to be exported or special color management, and most of these smaller programs simply can't handle that much depth without the team that Adobe has. (Don't ever talk to me about color management for factory packaging production.)

Finally, factor in the immense marketing team that Adobe has - designers are innately marketers, after all, and they've saturated most trendy design sites with pro-Adobe ads and likely have special deals behind the scene to keep their name relevant. Not a fan of that style of closed garden at all, so I skate by by using the most outdated version of PS (ie non subscription) I can find without crippling my workflow, and using others if I can.