"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."

Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.

Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry.

That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians.

Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it.

I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.

The problem is largely the entire concept of SaaS, but some stronger anti-trust anti-monopoly laws couldn't hurt either.

Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here.

I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.

I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma?

I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...

Then subscription subsistence reigned supreme and now I avoid Adobe products like the plague.

Happily using DxO PhotoLab while I continue to avoid a Lightroom subscription.

Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.

To be fair, Autodesk hasn't gone full spyware like Adobe. Otherwise, they're similarly poor stewards of industry "standard" software.

I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.

Only because they killed Freehand.

Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of. But they're always missing one thing or another. Either:

1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only)

2. they don't go far enough with the vector editing capabilities (e.g. Fireworks allows you to apply arbitrary gradients/textures/other image assets as the stroke and fill of vector shapes)

3. they don't go far enough with the non-destructiveness (e.g. Fireworks applies filter-effects to both vector and raster layers, as non-destructive "filter layers" bound to a parent layer — effectively "functional lenses" for images; can edit the base layer "underneath" these transformation layers, and see the transformed output change as a result. Of course, you can always "flatten" the transformations into the layer, to then edit the post-transformed version of the layer. Though IMHO this could be taken even further, with "brush modifications" being just another kind of transformation layer!)

4. they use project file formats that consist of entire directory bundles, or file formats opaque to the OS preview mechanism. Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file; and every OS knows how to preview PNG files. (And, if you didn't care about the project, you could just treat the PNG file as a PNG file, putting it through ImageMagick or MSPaint or whatever, which would strip the optional chunks, thus "exporting" the project to PNG without needing the program that created it!)

What happened with Macromedia was tragic.

I loved Fireworks, but it had far too many quirks that weren't improved, and when I discovered Sketch I was amazed how many thing that did bother me a lot in Fireworks were made just right in Sketch.

I think the concern has definitely gone to an anti-trust level. Adobe packages Lightroom for free with Photoshop, probably with Capture One directly in their sights. Anti-trust definitely needs a reinvigoration.

It's so stupid too, I'm happy paying subscriptions for things and happy paying a fair price but being tricked into doing it - never again, Adobe. They target their own customers with it to scrape a few more dollars into the current quarter, I guess. Probably some executive bonus targets or something.

And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.

This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.

I hate this level of sneaky trash “gotcha” behaviour…

To top it off, you just know it must make them a lot of money and they know there’s no other game in town, so screw us users, am I right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Sun_Microsystem...

Has more real value ever been destroyed in the service of paper value?

Arguably yes, though I am including DEC in this equation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq#Acquisition_by_Hewlett-...

I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).

> Microsoft buying Github

This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.

Hah, good joke, I've been hearing it for years now.

Then on the support call they will straight up pretend that none of their systems work in order to stop you from cancelling.

PS I just remembered that I forgot to cancel the subscription and they want to charge me 40 quid for the rest of the year. I even had a reminder set, but I missed it. So annoying.

> Says it’s a niche product not worth $20B

You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease of use is phenomenal. The collaboration capabilities are perfectly integrated. Even developers use it and love it.

They have taken the market by storm. And it’s a huge market.

You don’t seem to be part of that target market, and that’s fine. But saying Figma joining Adobe is a plus just shows how little you know about Figma and the web design world in general.

Hilariously bad take. Figma has very strong adoption. Lacking the same scale as Adobe doesn't mean it has bad adoption.

Also, our company credit card got replaced, and the process of updating the card and re-activating Creative Cloud took two weeks. It got canceled August 29 and only yesterday, September 14, was I able to launch Illustrator without a nag window. I hate Adobe.

With the next computer for half a year it was always this queasy, i should probably install illustrator now, but once I do I can never go back. Maybe I can hold out another few weeks. This is for a corporate paid for version that would make my work easier. Eventually I buckled and it ruined another computer.

10 years free though!

They also released quarterly earnings today, but those beat the market’s expectations. What’s going on?

[0] market cap = 144B * 17% = 26B

An example was Microsoft threatening to cancel HP’s Windows license if they bundled Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer back in the browser war days.