Surprising negativity in here, an observation to consider: HN tends to be biased regarding acquisitions. Some companies, like Google or Apple, are praised for sage decisions and invaluable acqui-hires. Others, like Yahoo and Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products or otherwise flailing capital. As i see it, Adobe identified a group of devs uniquely qualified to bring domain knowl…
I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe. Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service? People aren't hat…
As far as photo editing software goes, I've been a hobbyist and part time photographer for a while, and I'm not sure I've ever heard of Aviary. When people recommend alternatives to Photoshop, I hear about Pixelmator, GIMP, Paintshop Pro, and a few others, but I don't remember ever hearing of Aviary.
To me, it doesn't seem like Aviary competes with Adobe directly at all. They're probably eating into the market of people who apply a few filters and upload to Flickr, but not many of those people use LightRoom or PhotoShop anyway. Even then, it's small fries compared to the pro/hobbyist Photographer market, and those people aren't going to use a web based editor because of IP issues and the inconvenience of uploading gigabytes of RAW files.
Also remember Adobe is huge and has products for document editing and video editing and other stuff. It doesn't look like Aviary does anything in those areas.