Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe • Hacker News Board

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#41

Post by lstamour » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:29 AM UTC

achow wrote: post #19

microflash wrote: post #11

The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1] That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existin…

Also, this maybe distracting for either parties - Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.) - Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography t…

Canva slowly built out enterprise features, but it’s not fully there yet. They seem to be aiming for what Sketch was aiming for before Figma overtook it - the ability for teams to publish and use design systems and templates in Canva. Which is a cool niche to start with, but isn’t flexible enough.

Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#42

Post by throwaway2990 » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:40 AM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #21

pier25 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model. Adobe software is just better.

That's not true at all. There's also the strong dislike of Adobe as a company.

Due to subscriptions.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#43

Post by fuzztester » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:41 AM UTC

dudus wrote: post #30

Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal. I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behi…

>Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers.

Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#44

Post by skrebbel » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:49 AM UTC

Daub wrote: post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

Wow sucks to be your student

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#45

Post by zubspace » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:51 AM UTC

sotsoguk wrote: post #34

zubspace wrote: post #27

Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions. Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products. Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.

Sad, but true

Yes, and let me explain why.

Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.

While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.

It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.

And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#46

Post by ttoinou » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:54 AM UTC

hhh wrote: post #39

Daub wrote: post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

Why would you downgrade a student based on the tool they use to create their presentations instead of the content itself?

Because they made a bad tool choice for their own convenience ? That leads here to big images and unselectable text, no accessibility.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#47

Post by whitehexagon » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 6:56 AM UTC

I wonder in these type of takeovers, when it seems clear that nothing good can come next for the product users, if it would be somehow possible for a cooperative style takeover by the customer base.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#48

Post by Scrounger » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 7:01 AM UTC

enra wrote: post #36

dudus wrote: post #30

Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal. I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behi…

It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market. They are also about to ipo so this acquisition probably gives the an additinal growth story to sell.

> It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market.

Started by some 30 yo Australian chick with no tech background too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#49

Post by raffraffraff » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 7:02 AM UTC

appstorelottery wrote: post #25

I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version o…

> Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 12 Monterey or later and is fully optimized for Macs with Apple silicon.

Might save some non-Apple users some time.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#50

Post by jwr » Tue, Mar 26, 2024, 7:05 AM UTC

It's bad news and not because of the "fear of subscription" (if you think you aren't paying for a subscription now, you are deluding yourself).

The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).