All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity.
The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1]
Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable.
[1] Steve Jobs' open letter:
Thoughts on Flash
Don't get me wrong - I'm very glad we're all working in HTML5/Javascript/etc today and not ActionScript. And it would have required a herculean effort by Adobe to fix all of Flash's issues - probably a total rewrite of everything. But it's a lot easier to rewrite software than rebuild a giant community of developers.
From a strict business game theory perspective, it seems like Adobe really screwed this one up.
When they abandoned support for it they killed the careers of thousands of developers and removed their chance of dominating web app development.
Flex was miles ahead of what HTML 5 was producing at the time, if they had focused on getting the Flex compiler to output Javascript we would be living in a world where Adobe was synonymous with Web Dev.
Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.
The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.
Jobs last point harks back to the main development platform for the Mac being Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Macintosh. Apple were essentially beholden to a third party with regard to improving their OS, which along with licensing other hardware vendors, nearly put them out of business. Whether you or anyone agree or disagree with his motive, you could see why Jobs didn’t want to run that risk again. There is also the elephant that is the App Store in the room, but again, once bitten (retailers not carrying Apple Compatible software), you can understand the decision, without necessarily agreeing with it.
> Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs
It didn’t run particularly well on Windows, Linux or Android either...
Flash was designed, as its very first use case, for touch screen kiosks. So a lie.
Flash Player was perfectly performent, shit code that ran on it is different to the platform. When the first round of HTML 5 demos came out I made my own Flash equivalents, the HTML 5 demos ran at 80% CPU on my machine, the Flash versions ran at 5%.
> Flash was designed, as its very first use case, for touch screen kiosks. So a lie.
Bullshit. It was originally release By FutureWorks(?) as a vector tool to run on PenPointOS - that failed, so they pivoted to use the core as an animation tool for the web. Macromedia bought it added extra functionality, including ‘actions’. Adobe acquired Macromedia, and Flash, in 2006 (if memory serves correct). I remember them stopping development of, the vastly superior to Illustrator (IMHO), Freehand. They release Flex, which you may be confusing with Flash as it was based on it, as a platform for enterprise apps. If there was any kiosk targeted features, they were very definitely and after thought. So no, not lies.
Lastly performance. Annecdata. It ground my laptop to a halt and my desktop sounded like a jet engine taking off. I used quite heavy 3D and cad programs at the time, and even they did hog resources like Flash did. Admittedly, total annecdata. But enough people at the time saw fit to complain about it.
Huh? What APIs are you referring to?
There was no SIP back then, and from what I understand you didn't even have to sign kernel extensions. You could do just about whatever you want... right?
This is such nonsense.
Flash was available on Android, has no company hobbling its development, and still ran like cold molasses. It was canned by Adobe years before Flash was discontinued.
Your arguments remind me of the same Adobe fanboyism with which Thoughts on Flash was met at the time it was published — a decade has passed, evidence has disproven everything you’ve said, and you haven’t caught up because facts mustn’t get in the way of decrying the Apple bogeyman.
It turned Windows machines into jet planes, practically sterilised MacBook users who mistakenly ran Flash applets with their machines on their laps, and ran so poorly on Linux that running the Windows version in WINE worked much more; the Android version was over before it started, but no, “Apple blocked muh APIs”.
Give it up: Flash died the death it rightfully deserved. It has its time. That time passed.
All software is a sandcastle build on top of a thousand other sandcastles. It takes active maintenance, especially if it's a professional-grade tool.
Subscriptions are the best way to ensure active, responsive product development. They align the developer's incentive (keep paying me) with your incentive (keep my tool working).
You wouldn't pay a contractor everything up front to renovate your bathroom. You'd pay as you go to ensure the work continues and is of good quality. Same thing with software.
for people who only need affinity's feature set, it's perfect alternative. but it isn't putting a dent into adobe's revenue.
i'm not sure why you care to continue to slam adobe. if affinity's products and sales model suit you, why care what adobe does?
Affinity, you pay like, what, fifty bucks, and you’re done. No subscription, no fucking around with cracks. That’s a lot more appealing to someone still learning their craft.
I have seen this change happen to Photoshop, there are a lot more young artists who are using Clip Studio or Procreate than Photoshop for their work. I constantly see articles here talking about how UI people are using Figma or Sketch or whatnot instead of AI because they are both better-oriented to what they do and are a lot cheaper, with a buy-once model instead of a subscription.
Adobe is also terrible at listening to their users. I can point you to a top-ranked feature request for AI that had its “user story” put into the pipeline to be implemented “soon” something like two years ago, which is a feature I personally was putting into their old feature request inbox a decade ago. Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption, and Affinity has a solid competitor judging from my brief explorations of it.
It’s currently half off, so you can grab it for 25!
I don't even use the Affinity software, but I've bought them, purely because I want Adobe to have competition.
from a software standpoint, I could probably get away with Illy CS2 - the 'features' added since then have been .. mostly irrelevant. But if I don't have a subscription, I can't open client files.
- ed: numerous typos
But it’s such a product of a bureaucracy, built by people who never use it, and who awkwardly interface with the people who do.
Oh crikey - I forgot about the workarounds to achieve transparent gradients back in the old days! And we not that long ago got the ability to [finally] open PDFs with more than one page, which is - well, the fact that it didn't happen a decade or more ago - telling.
Clip Studio's a special case. For certain uses, such as cartooning/comicing, it is WAY better than anything Photoshop can offer. I've got that as well and look forward to digging into it further, but even with extremely basic familiarity the tools for building panels/folders and speech bubbles in Clip Studio (or pretty much anything for a cartoonist/manga artist, especially if you're targeting black and white printed output) are so far beyond Adobe stuff it's quite silly.
I daresay there are parallels for UI people with Figma/Sketch or what have you. I can speak to the Clip Studio situation (and I'm also happy with Affinity Photo for what it specializes in).
> but I can really see Affinity being a lot more appealing to new artists.
Even experienced ones! Affinity Designer et al. are fantastic! The workbooks they publish (advanced user guides) free video tutorials are great as well. And they have a much nicer community than Adobe -- much more clueful and helpful.
In no way should my comment (that Adobe is better) be taken as even a hint of negativity towards Affinity.
They fill different needs, or should I say, a different spectrum of needs.
My main complaint is all the people griping about Adobe's subscription model. Who cares??? If Affinity is so good, use that instead! If you find you need the much richer feature set of Illustrator, guess what -- pony up. I personally wish that Affinity would either charge more or move to subscription. $50/yr really? I would love to pay $50/yr to see the most infuriatingly simple yet absent features get implemented. Especially now since I've been forced to Catalina and can no longer use my CS6 products. But that's not where we are, and doesn't give me grounds to complain that a product I want is expensive.
> Illustrator is really, really ripe for disruption
and self-driving cars are right around the corner ...
That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp.
Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software.
If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
Then I learned Blender and nothing comes close for speed and efficiency, except maybe Vim.
They aren't. Just look in this thread for many many examples. One thing I didn't see mentioned was scripts.
If they were, Adobe would be scrambling.
There isn't this grey line where one tool can do the same things but in some different way. There is a sharp line where the cheap tool can't do it at all. You're comparing excel to google sheets.
UX enrages aside, the only thing not to like about illustrator is the cost. I also hate that you can't get a nice car for under $50k. That doesn't make the $50k and up cars an object of hate.