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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

finance.yahoo.com

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

#192
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no one wants to pay for products they like.

Well, everyone of their clients was paying for a license. Affinity was not free/fremium.

Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.

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

#193
I don't see the point of this acquisition. The products don't compete, so it's not eliminating market competition. The products also don't 'synergize' (ugh) well: they target different market demographics, have separate learning curves and different business models. Why?

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

#194
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only subscription, but what I find problematic about Adobe is bloatware.

Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.

It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.

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

#195
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really seems that the whole software world has decided to move to monthly payments. It really irks me. I don't want this.

Have to extract the most value for shareholders. Only way i see it changing is people start stealing software because they get sick of it or people stop using subscription based licenses all together.

I absolutely hate it too. I think we all need a subscriptions manager.

Adobe for example were charging me $15 per month for Lightroom forever and Lightroom had broken and deleted all my photos years before. I think there was a problem with their software because I did not have a subscription that I could see when I logged in to any of the accounts I had.

I just gave up at some point trying to cancel (I'd even talked with their chat for several hours). But recently logged in and managed to finally see the hidden subscription! It was still difficult to cancel but at least I could actually do it!

Hard to know what to do apart from take Adobe to the small claims court about this.

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

#196
I guess there goes Affinity's only reason one might prefer them over Adobe. Personally, I use all their programs quite a bit (Photo, Designer, Publisher). I like them, but I don't think they're better than Adobe's offering. If they'll eventually shift to a subscription model, I guess I won't be interested in Affinity anymore, given their products are inferior.

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

#197
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, everyone of their clients was paying for a license. Affinity was not free/fremium.

Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.

And yet, they released a new version and I and every Affinity user I know bought it. Don't forget that a lot of people moved from Adobe to Affinity apps because Adobe rammed subscriptions down their throats. There is a lot of loyalty towards Affinity because they are not Adobe, if they become a mini-Adobe, that loyalty will be burned to the ground. And at that point, why not just use Adobe products? They'll lose playing Adobe's game, Adobe has infinite funds in comparison and can pull an Office 365 on Canva.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure speculation on my part but I think the way it will go down is Canva will announce that you can get access to Affinity products via a Canva subscription, with an option to buy the individual products outright like today. They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".

> They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation". They can also look at the market and Adobe and go “yeah, they have no alternatives, everyone is a subscriber now”

Yup, that's also my assumption of what will happen. Ugh...

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

#199

These kind of acquisitions always astonish me. How does a web company that essentially sells toys get the money to purchase a company that sells professional desktop products?

True. Maybe a proof of the power of subscription based models?
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