Slashdot Mirror
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.
Is it too powerful? I dunno I stopped using around the year 2000. I use tools like GIMP and Krita for GUI based editing, but most of my editing is done on the command line with tools like ImageMagick or custom python scripts with the Pillow library.
The summary reads like nonsensical whinging about things that have nothing to do with Adobe.
Animated GIF not being supported is a good thing. We almost killed that crappy thing until bloody Facebook decided to create a GIF keyboard that allowed you to reply with animated memes. What good purposes outside of this still remains for GIF? Leave it in the 90s along with Zip drives, floppy disks, and computer cases without any style. You complain that Adobe carries itself like it's the only game in town while acknowledging that it's the only game in town and that you can't get away from it. *golfclap*.
As for not supporting an OSX feature, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you think Mac is as relevant as it once was. Once the platform of creators has for so long rested on its laurels, provided no good incentive for consumers to favour it and its expensive non-customisable hardware, and repeatedly shat on developers of it's own platform to the point where it's x64 migration was managed poorly enough that an entire major version of Adobe's suite wasn't released on Mac in 64bit variant at a time where > 4GB of memory was actually relevant to the industry. OSX has a native fullscreen feature? Cool, the couple of percent of the market may be disappointed that Adobe doesn't support it, instead it rolled it's own fullscreen feature for the far more popular (almost by an order of magnitude now) windows platform.
Adobe is the 800-pound gorilla of the digital graphics market. Whenever any application achieves dominance, it jacks its pricing up to as much as the market can bear. Remember Word Perfect? It used to be the dominant PC word processor (and was priced accordingly) until it lost out to Word as the world switched to Windows. When Word and the MS Office Suite achieved dominance, their pricing also pushed the limit of what the market can bear. You see where I'm going here.
Adobe and its graphics troika Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign have dominated the industry for far, far too long and Adobe is in need of serious competition. Corel has been content enough with being a distant #2 that I don't think they'll ever aspire to push for the #1 spot (their pricing is better than Adobe, but is still too high for the solo graphic designer operating on a shoe-string). Fortunately, Serif's Affinity line with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer (and the upcoming Affinity Publisher) may just have a clear shot at Adobe. Their pricing is insanely aggressive ($50 with free upgrades) and their feature sets gives you about 80% of what Adobe has. Because Serif is a UK company, I hope it can avoid getting bought out by Adobe when it becomes a perceived threat to Adobe's cash cows.