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The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

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Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#121

These threads remind me of the MS threads. Just like MS doesn't care about home users, Adobe doesnt care about hobbyists. Unless you're a professional graphic designer, you're probably using less than 1% of its capabilities and frankly have a pretty worthless opinion on it. "Well I'm a software dev and I use Lightroom so I kinda know what I'm talking about". No, you don't.

You're forgetting about the pipeline.

People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.

Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.

Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#123
post #49

It will take a generation, but once students at school will be using something else than Adobe, it is over for them. Same with Microsoft

Oh they are present in schools all right, along with google. Giving away free samples to get them hooked.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple being an off and on competitor in the space was always strange. They failed to commit, and often let their tools languish, despite the following. Odd.

Apple moved into the space when Adobe's willingness to support the Mac faltered during the transition from classic MacOS to OSX. Once Adobe finally committed to supporting the new platform, it wasn't as necessary anymore.

I’m referring to later things like the macpro and aperture.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#125
post #69
post #8

If you're a hobbyist needing photo editing software, just use https://www.photopea.com/

Photopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop fo…

[deleted]

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't pay for $5 coffee. I make my coffee at home, from my own grind, with just some half and half. Sure, I splurged and paid for maybe a $100 grinder or something, but that is being used for years, meaning the cost per cup is abysmal. It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.

I agree. It's up there with prices as high as $100 being described as "less than the price of a good meal".

It is getting pretty hard for my family of four to go out and eat for less than $100, but we have food at home.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#127
post #20

I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790…

I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against…

I am surprised that patents (and not regulatory requirements) is what keeps autodesk alive in the field

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category. Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH! I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it woul…

I don't pay for $5 coffee. I make my coffee at home, from my own grind, with just some half and half. Sure, I splurged and paid for maybe a $100 grinder or something, but that is being used for years, meaning the cost per cup is abysmal. It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.

And I don't drink coffee, just water. Since software is priced as beverage equivalence, logically that means I should get software for free.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#129
post #20

I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790…

I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against…

ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.

Re: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

#130
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I struggle to think of it as insidious. The problem you have is you're reading it wrong. There is no monthly licence. It's an annual licence that you can either pay up front or split, either way, you need to pay. In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only n…

It’s insidious because you’re being required to agree to pay for a year of use, split monthly, but cannot decide to cancel during the term of the agreement without paying for use that you don’t want. Just because the terms are clear doesn’t mean it’s not an insidious pricing scheme. If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?…

I can understand not wanting to pay Adobe every month, but the commercial reality would require a month-long contract would have to be extraordinarily expensive, to offset the people who do only need it occasionally who'd otherwise be on an annual contract.

Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.

Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.

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