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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.
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.
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.
Somebody is offering animated gifs as “proof” that Adobe’s Creative Suite is “too powerful”?
Adobe is able to ignore the competition because it’s been able to purchase and absorb every meaningful competitor out there. The corporation itself may very well be too powerful, but it’s got little to do with its CC suite - that’s the end result, not the cause. A number of those applications weren’t created by Adobe anyway.
#DeleteChrome
I'm of the age when I remember GIF's from the 90's as a "cool" way to animate things, before Flash was a big deal. Flash has gone the way of the dodo, and so should gifs. I'm not sure what everyone's fascination with making animated gifs are when we have much MUCH better technology today with web-purposed video formats, like WEBM, instead of using clunky formats from the 80's.
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.
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Honestly, who actually pays for Photoshop? I'll tell you who: professionals. If you aren't paying for it but you are still using it then you are pirating the software. Honestly, there are enough applications out there for every platform to do image manipulation that anyone crying over Adobe is unlikely to even be entitled to use the software in the first place.
these image editors are not designed to handle animated GIFs
Sure... but last I checked either was Photoshop. Also, who is paying for Photoshop to make animated GIFs? Nobody. Crying about a lack of alternatives not existing when you aren't even willing to pay for it in the first place is just pathetic.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Ok, maybe I am too tired, got back from work, but I don't understand anything on that post. The highlights I got:
- Not many programs handle animated gifs. Who cares? OK, those who care could use PSP or something?
- There some sort of annoying window movement when dragging a photo from a web browser to Photoshop? What???
- Photoshop does not support OS X full screen mode. Okayyy, hadn't actually noticed that, as I actually don't do serious work on the laptop display and full screen works really bad on a 3 monitor setup. Maybe it is a feature some people would like? Definitely not the major issue with Photoshop.
And all these inane points suggest "Photoshop is to 'powerful' for it's own good"? How? Why?
Dear god, is our post quality going to reduce even more?
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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.
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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.
Go look at this submitter's profile - all are from vice.com. And the submissions are direct lifts from the articles themselves.
So while it seems this "person" was out looking at image editors, they weren't. They are just copy/pasting from articles into a slashdot submission form and the editors are doing nothing of the sort.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It doesn't matter if you're into music creation, video editing, photo editing, or just working on spreadsheets. The software applications market has trended towards consolidation. mergers and the little guys becoming niches or irrelevant.
I'm not an artist, but I work for a company full of creative people who do use software like Adobe Creative Cloud. I really don't believe they NEED it to get their work done, but it's much more an issue of what they learned to use back in school, or with previous employers. We still battle constantly with people demanding we buy full versions of even the Adobe Acrobat software, when plenty of shareware PDF editing solutions already exist that cost FAR less. Since Adobe invented the PDF document, it stands to reason they're the most comprehensive editing solution for the file format. But there's no way we really have dozens of people employed here who fully utilize the esoteric features you only get with the "real" Adobe branded software!
I've been able to do pretty much everything I needed to do with a PDF file using the Preview app that comes with OS X on my Mac. It lets me selectively remove pages from a document, annotate it, add a saved signature to it, re-order pages or insert pages .... all the common stuff.
But yeah.... the times when I wanted to do some graphics work for a web site or what-not? I always found great solutions with little freeware or shareware tools out there. You don't get everything in one application, under one set of menu choices though. Maybe for a lot of professionals, that's the deal-breaker? But I think I'd rather shuffle my drawing or photo in and out of 6 or 7 different tools, as needed, vs. paying month after month to keep my Adobe applications properly licensed and running. Clearly though, there are plenty of people making enough money with their creative works so they'll pay Adobe's prices.