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Is Adobe's Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good? (vice.com)
Reader samleecole writes: Recently I was looking around at the state of modern image editors and discovered something really disappointing. The issue? Well, even with the rise of modern Photoshop alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator, these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs. Which means that, despite the fact that I'd certainly love to see what life is like outside of the world of Adobe, it looks like I'm stuck in that ecosystem for a little while longer. Don't get me wrong: Adobe's software is great, if a bit expensive. But I do think that its business model highlights just how consolidated its power actually is -- and it's not talked about nearly enough in the creative space.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
[...] Adobe is too powerful and can ignore things it doesn't want to do -- whether in the form of cutting prices or ignoring usability concerns -- in part because it carries itself like it's the only game in town. Here's a case in point that matters a lot to me, actually: Apple has supported a native fullscreen mode in Mac OS since 10.7, better known as Lion. It's a fundamental feature, and helps keep windows well-sorted on laptops in particular. It works pretty well in every major Mac application -- except Adobe's. Worse, if you drag a picture from a web browser into Photoshop, the window moves and doesn't stay in the middle of the screen, creating a constant frustration that could be remedied if, again, Adobe bothered to support the native fullscreen mode that has come in Mac OS for the past seven and a half years.
If all you want is Animated GIFs, lemme tell ya. I make them using Paint Shop Pro 5. It came out in 1998. It still works perfectly well on Windows 10 x64. It is also so small, it loads instantly on modern hardware. It is amazing for quick simple tasks.
If you care about animated GIFs, you're not who Photoshop is aimed at.
Personally I use Pixelmator - it easily covers anything I need. But again - my needs are reasonable simple and I'm simply not who Photoshop is really targeted at.
I really like Adobe as a company, but I think its suite has become so costly and unavoidable for the average creative consumer that it needs to be a little bit smaller
No. You like the software. All of the things in your article are reasons you should NOT like Adobe as a company.
Side note: hard to take the criticisms about usability very seriously when they are posted on mobo.vice. Talk about a bloated.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I second GIMP. I stopped using Photoshop and forced myself to learn GIMP, took about 3 days before I was more proficient in GIMP than Photoshop and I've never looked back.
In GIMP, each animation frame is just a layer. When you save you have the option to save to animation which does all the work for you. Here is a quick guide: https://elearnhub.org
ACC has used the network effect to get and stay on top. A manager for a graphics department wants to spend as little money as possible on software. ACC has made a one-stop-shop pretty much. You buy/rent ACC and you get the vast majority of what you need to make and manage graphics.
While there are competitors, they are not as complete as ACC, meaning you have to buy and/or learn yet more software to get the missing features. And orgs also don't want a learning curve for newly hired graphic artists. If your shop uses a mish-mash of tools, finding employees who are a ready fit will be harder. Orgs want plug-and-play employees.
It's similar to Microsoft: an org buys Microsoft not because it's the best, but because everybody else knows it, and they cover the gamut of most business needs in a good-enough way. IBM used to occupy that niche, but MS knocked them off the hill.
It's a winner-take-most economy. Enjoy.
Table-ized A.I.
As much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree with thegarbz. Apple used to be amazing. But now? They are an insult. OSX is still ok-ish but it's less reliable than it used to be... and wow... don't get me started on their hardware.
Non repairable. Not upgradable. You're basically forced to buy a $5000 toaster. The only way out is to not buy their computers at all, and lease them instead.
And it's not even a *good* toaster. They took what was IMO the best keyboard in the industry and made it the worst. It's barely better than typing directly on a glass screen, which is seriously painful if you're a good typist. Only USB-C ports, so you better hope that you didn't forget your docking station or dongles, or that they haven't failed on you (as VERY many reviewers on the apple store have complained about...) as you're about to do an important presentation. Gimmicks like the touchbar that shoot the unit cost through the roof, are unreliable, and provide negligible benefit.
And funnily enough, every single method to work around all the various compromises just so happens to net apple more money. Buy more dongles. Interest from leases and you don't even keep the hardware.
Despite their claims to the contrary, Apple has abandoned the entire professional market that supported them for so long.
And the biggest killer of all? They can get away with it because at least it's not Windows 10.
I can't think of another time when Linux on the Desktop was not just desired, but desperately needed, than now.
There are people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who are not full-time creative professionals.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software who can make intelligent decisions about when to pay for an upgrade and how to budget over more than the next quarter.
There are also people who use (or used to use) Adobe's software outside the United States where the current subscription rates are significantly higher.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as someone involved with smaller businesses often working in creative industries one way or another, we chose some time ago to minimise our dependence on any software with a mandatory subscription, for the simple reason that regardless of price, anything that can be arbitrarily broken or turned off by the software developer is a huge liability. If we can't use the latest version, we'll stick with the old one. If we can't get the old one any more, we'll find something else. We have yet to encounter a situation where that was not possible and we couldn't transfer our important assets -- our data and the people who created it -- to use the new system in some reasonable way.
As a convenient side effect, almost all of the replacements we're using now are either the small-scale "upstarts" competing with established products from the lies of Adobe (think Sketch, Affinity, etc.) or from the FOSS world (think Linux, Blender, etc.). We're both saving money and supporting the little (but growing) guys.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.