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Comment by davidgh | Hacker News Reader

Feels like classic Innovator’s Dilemma [1]. Adobe’s incumbent bread-winning products do not allow them to internally develop less expensive alternatives that would actively erode revenue from the legacy products. So outside companies do it instead.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

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There's more going on here. Figma targets collaboration. Canva tackles ease of use. Nothing was stopping Adobe improving in that department.

Photoshop already has a cheap monthly subscription. Why not do a similar price point with a new collaboration and ease of use layer slapped on Illustrator?

Cheap is relative, would I rather have Photoshop for 2.5 months or a permanent license of Affinity Photo?

I'm taking into account a current 50% discount, but I think that's fair since Adobe products no longer go on sale.

But even without the sale, it's 5 months of Photoshop versus a permanent license.

The main thing that was stopping them from improving in the collaboration / usability department was the fact that Adobe's products are extremely comprehensive – that's how they differentiate. But that comprehensiveness comes at the expense of complexity, makes it harder to have a really tight interface and add things like collaboration features.

The comprehensiveness is what allowed them to win in the enterprise, but it came at a high price. If Figma wants to become an enterprise solution they'll probably end up getting really complex too.

Comprehensiveness is one of Adobe's differentiators, the other is specialised products that seamlessly interoperate. Illustrator is "Photoshop, but focus on vectors", InDesign is "Illustrator but for page design", Animate is "Illustrator, but for animations", Aftereffects is "animate but for video". All of them seamlessly interchange files with each other.

Adding tools with the sole purpose to give a less powerful, more intuitive interface would have fit perfectly into the Adobe ecosystem.

Well Adobe products in reality interoperate very badly. It's very apparent Indesign, Illustrator, AE used to be made by different companies and they have different codebases.

For example if you want to import some vector shape from Illu to either Indesign or AE... its pretty complicated. Especially if you need to be able to make edits after the import (like animate the shape or change colors). Or if you want to copy text boxes? Forget it.

This is obvious when you compare it to Affinity suite where not only you can copy anything around but you can instantly switch from one app to other inside the apps. Switching is then more like "vector mode", "pixel mode" and "layout mode". It all works much better and faster.

Collaboration is pretty difficult to retrofit onto an existing product. A collaborative text editor like Google Docs needs to be designed for that purpose in mind, and the state-of-the-art techniques (CRDTs and OT) are still undergoing active research. See also the xi-editor retrospective: https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...

I imagine Figma, being built around CRDTs and a web platform, probably had a number of intentional design differences from Photoshop etc.

They can always buy outside companies and kill their competing products, right?

Maybe that's just my bitterness talking as someone who really liked Fireworks for screen design work, and think it fell prey to the dilemma between it and Photoshop.

(I'm still using FW, but that won't be an option on macOS once Mojave stops getting updates.)

Reminds me of another classic Innovator's Dilemma to have panned out with Google and Y! guarding their web-scale infrastructure from the outside world even as AWS was running away with IaaS.

https://gigaom.com/2007/12/04/google-infrastructure/

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