The Past, Present and Future of Sketch | Hacker News Reader

The Past, Present and Future of Sketch

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45 pointsallanberger9 comments

  There is always the worry that someone else is going to do
  something you are not able to. But at the same time I think 
  companies that are hell bent focused on growing can as a  
  result lose time in setting up that growth; including 
  setting up new staff, getting them moving in the right 
  direction, etc. I think with a small focused team you can 
  achieve plenty. I don’t think just having more people means 
  you move faster or better.

This. This all day and all night. Growth for growth sake is the blind spot of most entrepreneurs, as they see team size as some sort of pissing match. I see each person you hire as a very personal responsibility, and their lives and livelihood as essential as my own. The idea of hiring people based on hopes and dreams is really irresponsible, and yet many managers agree and willfully acknowledge they hire 20-30 people with no real commitment to them as individuals, with lives.

I am a Sketch fan, but I'll definitely be using it with some extra respect now.

I love the sound of an entrepreneur who speaks without the pressures and hype of other people's money behind them.

    Customers just don’t like the idea of subscribing to software. We’ve seen
    that when Adobe discontinued Fireworks — that was one of our biggest sales
    days. Adobe’s pitch was basically that you can now switch to Photoshop. And
    many people said, I don’t really like Photoshop and I don’t want to pay for
    it monthly, so let me see what else is out there.

Here I witness a very serious ignoratio elenchi. The market's response to "Fireworks is gone. Use Photoshop" was an immediate exodus of many Adobe customers, myself included. He has confused this with an apprehension to subscriptions.

He does address this later in the paragraph.

  In the beginning, Adobe introduced subscriptions as an alternative
  to the normal paid upgrades. Then a few years after that, they
  switched to subscriptions only–that was another one of our biggest
  sales days. We could clearly see people don’t like the idea of
  subscriptions if they don’t perceive a very obvious justification for it.

But, that's not what happened with Fireworks. Adobe stopped supporting Fireworks, period. Even when they introduced the Fireworks subscription, they said they wouldn't release updates to it.

IOW, Fireworks died and that is the reason everyone flocked to Sketch, et al.

Perhaps what he should have said was, that there is some apprehension to Adobe subscriptions. The price won't be "Price of Sketch"/"Date of next major version", that's for sure.

Well, besides that, the point I'm making is that, in the example given, there is no implied relationship between Adobe switching to a subscription model and users abandoning Adobe for Sketch. There is, however, a relationship between Adobe giving up on Fireworks and users abandoning Adobe for Sketch.

All I'm saying, really, is that if it comes down to giving my people a raise, or paying for Creative Cloud, the raise wins every time. Especially when the alternatives are better.

Worth noting that the Hebrides is a diverse collection of many islands rather than a single island, as Mr Omvlee states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrides

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