Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 353 posts

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

#301

Post by Auracle »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #230
klelatti wrote: post #70

Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell. Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.

>So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell. They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big par…

I was a professional photographer until late last year.

Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”

There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.

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

#303

Post by objektif »

goralph wrote: post #59
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…

You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students

He sounds like a very good educator. I wish people always guided me against using shitty services throughout my education.

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

#304

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

omnimus wrote: post #69
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace. Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed. The reason why everyone hates th…

> Have you tried Affinity

Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.

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

#305

Post by pseingatl »

xz18r wrote: post #52

If they move Affinity to subscription, CorelDRAW is probably the only viable (commercial) graphic product left with a perpetual license. Apart from FOSS, of course.

No, there's Viva Designer, a German desktop publishing program.

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

#306

Post by pseingatl »

Daub wrote: post #33
pier25 wrote: post #28

Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.

What could they do better? I am interested.

Affinity Publisher lacks epub export.

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

#308

Post by mandmandam »

pier25 wrote: post #283
mandmandam wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto. > Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator. "A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better. But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.

> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).* Believe what you will. Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard. It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me. > And in many ways Designer is leagues better. In what ways? Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphic…

> In what ways?

Off the top of my head...

Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.

The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.

It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.

It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.

Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.

There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.

... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.

...Which is probably about to change :(

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

#309

Post by omnimus »

pier25 wrote: post #241
omnimus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace. Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed. The reason why everyone hates th…

> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace. I disagree with all your points. I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so. Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than…

On Indesign side - regular almost daily crashes.

Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.

I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.

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

#310

Post by omnimus »

pier25 wrote: post #283
mandmandam wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto. > Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator. "A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better. But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.

> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).* Believe what you will. Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard. It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me. > And in many ways Designer is leagues better. In what ways? Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphic…

I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.

I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.

Post reply on HN