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Comment by halotrope | Hacker News Reader

The increasing consolidation in the professional software market is concerning to say the least. I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others. Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly on design and publishing tooling. Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite". Same with Autodesk and how they turned e.g Maya from one of the greatest software packages of all time into a bug-ridden shadow of its former self. Tools like Blender and KiCad really get my hopes high that we have a century of industry standard open source software with good UX ahead of us. I would be much more to e.g pay 50 bucks a month to blender foundation than being a hostage of Creative Cloud. I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did.

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> I remember back in the day Macromedia made fine authoring software like Flash and Director, the best lightweight vector software Pagemaker and others.

I get your point and I agree, but it's an ironic example considering every single one of those were only Macromedia products through consolidation:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacroMind

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FutureWave_Software

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altsys (Assuming you meant FreeHand instead of Pagemaker)

At least Fireworks was an actual Macromedia creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks

Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Golive (vs Dreamweaver), Photoshop (vs Fireworks) and even had its own Flash knock-off (LiveMotion). So way too much redundancy so that most Macromedia product rapidly went unmaintained, or abandoned when Adobe failed to milk them. But where Adobe completely dropped the ball, and where Macromedia strength was is community. Macromedia's product community was incredible. I also can't believe they had that many developers knowing Action Script to throw it all away, there are millions thing Flash could have done, like focus on game dev or desktop dev. It's just that Adobe wasn't willing to invest much in it at some point.

Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping...

Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.

That is indeed surprising and ironic.

I have no idea how anti-trust laws in the united states are supposed to work. Like why is Disney allowed to buy every studio? Why is Amazon allowed to buy like anything? Facebook also being allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp is crazy.

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

As long as Disney doesn't 'harm' consumers they are allowed to consolidate. Harm is poorly defined in this case.

As long as you can't show direct consumer harm, and esp if the products are free, Anti-Trust law in the US isn't about reducing choice (EU) but in raising prices. So if you can't show a price hike, the mergers and monopolies are allowed.

I am firm believer in the EU model of anti-trust and this wouldn't have even be possible if they both agreed.

Buying the rights to old movies is quite a bit different than buying patents or businesses.

In the movie case, nobody else can distribute the old movie. In the patent or business case youve prevented future business, competition, invention. Owning an old movie doesnt prevent somebody from making a new movie about something different.

Where do you draw the line on how many stories a company can own before they have "enough and cant buy or make more." If Disney can make new movies, how is it any different to buy an existing one?

You can't really make Instagram these days. Well you can, but it won't have any users.

Is TikTok not an Instagram competitor?

That's a good point I overlooked, though I always saw TikTok as a Twitter-without-text, or non-ephemeral Snapchat, your point stands regardless.

This is because it's just a sale of intellectual property (or physical property) from one company to the other - the U.S. prides itself on the individual liberty to do so, and because corporations are legal persons they're also allowed to do that. That's why, if the government or someone else thinks a certain sale is anticompetitive, you have to make a case that they shouldn't be allowed to exercise that liberty.

Monopolies are actually not illegal, only anti-competitive behaviour is. Beyond that, it's a matter of political doctrine. People in power are now extremely lenient when it comes to what constitute abusing a monopoly...

Relevant book recommendation: https://surveillancevalley.com/

> I am very happy that Altium decided the way they did.

Don't be. Altium has been trying to do the same thing as Adobe.

They can't go full month-to-month or everybody will drop them like a hot potato. However, they have gradually been locking down symbol and part libraries so that you do have to pay month-to-month.

We'll probably upgrade our Altium licenses once more. KiCAD will probably be up to speed within that timespan. After that, we'll park our Altium licenses at a specific version and switch over to KiCAD.

We've been waiting for KiCAD 6. The data format upgrades are extremely important since it links the schematic and layout systems properly so things like annotation can flow both directions (schematic->layout and layout->schematic).

"Everything became a slow, entangled, expensive mess now called "Creative Suite".

There's probably an opportunity to make better versions of these tools. Even their crown jelwels. If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market I'll cancel my creative suite subscription instantly.

The Affinity software[1] has been excellent for my usecases. Their pricing is also incredible, with Photo and Designer each running $25 right now. Last week one of our employees said during a call that Photo their best software purchase in recent years.

That being said, my Adobe experience was heavy in Photoshop. Affinity Photo is more competitive there (their content-aware fill is impressive). Designer still has some ways to go to compete with Illustrator on level ground.

1. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

I second affinity. As someone who often resorted to pirated Photoshop because of it's very infrequent use, the first time I saw that affinity got all of the PS and Illustrator features I use for $50 combined I jumped on it. I couldn't be happier with my decision.

"If a decent enough quality version of lightroom that works with Linux comes on the market"

It's called Darktable. https://www.darktable.org/

I've tried to use Darktable as replacement, and there's no comparison in terms of UX and functionality (within the specific use case that Lightroom is intended for).

I'd like to use an open source product, but there is a huge amount of work put into Lightroom (I've been a long time user, and it's very easy to pick a new version and use new functionalities with trivial effort), aimed at making things easy to use for a non-expert, that is hard to match without big backing.

I personally use Darktable to process my raw photos for some time. While I didn't use Lightroom for any considerable amount of time, I've found that Darktable can process relatively modern raw files (A7III in my case) easily and with pretty high quality.

What are you missing especially? It answered all my needs so far.

For some examples you can see https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocoder/ . Some are not processed with Darktable, but all EXIF is intact, so you can check for yourself.

The problem is UX, so it's not missing something in the sense that it's not possible to achieve something, rather, that something is very easy to achieve for somebody who's not an expert.

The last time I've tested Darktable was quite some time ago, but, on top of my head:

- dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR

- pano stitching

- auto retouching; experts clearly don't care about this, but for a non-expert, it produces an easy base to work on (assuming it has a very solid implementation)

- I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.

I'm sure all of the above "can be done" in any software (in particularly, the last one), but that's not really the point - the point is how easy it is for a non-expert to effectively use all of them. I remember just going through each panel, and applying effects by moving sliders. That's a great UX experience for non-experts - experts can use Photoshop.

I understand for what you saying, but when I started to use Darktable (>=2.4.x and 3.x to be exact), giving an hour of poking allowed me to understand most of its basic operation. So latest iterations of Darktable is not obscure like earlier versions of Blender. It's much more discoverable.

> dehazing is super-easy and very effective in LR

Darktable has a dehaze filter and it works very well, but didn't compare with LR TBH.

> pano stitching

Didn't need it yet, so no comments here.

> auto retouching;

Darktable auto settings for some tools, but I didn't dig deeper since I don't use auto stuff much, TBH.

> I remember LR making it very easy to straighten photos by drawing a line with a tool.

It's exactly the same in Darktable. Plus it has a very solid perspective detection and correction tool.

I'm not a photo pro. Just an enthusiast if you're eager to put a level. I explored Darktable exactly the way you've told. Just open an image, open a category and play with sliders, that's all.

Main thing I find Lightroom is superior compared to Darktable is being able apply adjustments consistently across groups of photos. You might have say 6 photos all taken of the same subject in the same conditions. You adjust one the way you want, and then literally copy and paste the categories of settings from one to all the other photos you want. Darktable doesn't seem to have that sort of workflow to get through hundreds of photos quickly.

This is perfectly doable in Darktable too. You can either save the adjustments you want as a style or just copy the history stack and paste to other images.

Just did the same thing last week.

I have a Canon point and shoot that I use for underwater photos and Darktable really doesn't cope well with some of the RAW files. I believe it's related to the zoom. I also vastly prefer Lightroom's overall workflow. That may be something that could be fixed with adjustment, though.

If you prefer, you can share one of the problematic RAW files with me, so I can take a look at it. I'm just curious.

As I've said, I didn't use LR for any significant amount of time. Its workflow may be smoother, but I don't prefer Adobe's software, though.

I appreciate the offer, but I honestly don't know where the RAW is anymore. I've been quite the slacker about taking photos the last couple of years.

I use Darktable. It is not as ergonomic as Lightroom but since it has enough actual functionality I gladly take it over having to deal with all that subscription insanity in general and dealing with Adobe in particular.

I just do not use software that has no perpetual licenses except when required by client and client pays for it.

Last year I used Darktable and Lightroom side by side. They were both steaming piles of crap. Lots of bugs, crashes, and extremely high CPU usages. Darktable was slightly less buggy on MacOS but not much. Lightroom was easier to figure out but I’m not really using anything but basic features on both apps.

Similarly I used Darktable under OS X and didn't hit to any bugs. Exporting files require some patience since it maxes all cores at once, but nothing crashed or burned during the journey.

What OSX LR bugs have you hit? Apart from it being slow sometimes, I cant think of a bug I've hit.

I do not remember Darktable ever crashing on me (well I am not professional and maybe not using all the features heavily). Also I use it less than a year, maybe older versions were less stable. I use it on Windows which can be a factor as well.

Darktable is not sufficient quality to be considered seriously as a LR replacement, sadly.

Pixelmator is like $30 (once, not subscription) and is better than Photoshop.

IIRC it's made by a small team of dedicated devs in Latvia (edit: actually it's their other l-neighbor Lithuania, just looked it up), and I love it.

DaVinci Resolve (now stewarded by Blackmagic Design) is a Premiere/AE replacement that is preferred by many in industry. It's also buy-once-ware (not subscription) and runs natively on Linux.

Adobe has nothing resembling a monopoly.

Is there a decent size community for Pixelmator? The difficulty with many of the open source or lesser known commercial products is that even if they're better than the big market leader, the amount of learning materials and community support is so much greater for the market leader.

TBH The Affinity Triad (Photo, Designer, Publisher) is more popular than Pixelmator, more featured, does windows & mac and has a community. It's also a pay-once set of apps and is made by a medium size software company in the UK called Serif. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/

I've never used it but I believe Corel's version of Lightroom works on Linux.

I only use Lightroom for its catalog, there is better software out there for editing RAWs with DXO Photolab and Capture One.

Don't forget Softimage XSI... losing that one still hurts.

The consolidation is an illusion caused by not seeking out and/or encountering new competitors. Once there was Adobe plus some small-time company you were fond of. Then Adobe bought that small company. So now you think that only Adobe remains. Guess what? Some other company has taken up the slack, filling the niche left behind by that other small-time company. You just have to go find it.

>Since adobe gobbled them up they have a quasi Monopoly

I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement. Microsoft, Adobe, AutoDesk..

Worth watching Steve Jobs's comment on Tech Monopolies again.

https://twitter.com/dwineman/status/1274101859049893888

> I dont have a problem with Monopoly per se. I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement.

That is a consequence of having a monopoly.

If Apple cared about products they would strive for more competition to push them to create better products and not to cement their monopoly. During Jobs's leadership, yea, they innovated with amazing products but they also stepped up patent trolling, anti-competitive practices and hostile takeovers.

Personally, I don not think the profit-motive alone in a monopolistic market can bring about innovation. It is competition that makes it happen...after all, Apple with Jobs needed to compete and innovate during their difficult years to survive. Now, after cementing their monopoly, they just rode out up until iphone 12...it will take another great company to break this pattern of marketing idealization of the next iphone 15

Wait, are you telling me that Apple, an international legal business entity prioritizes money over the abstract value of competition? Why I never.

It's so incredibly obvious, yet it frequently needs to be spelled out.

> I have a problem with their quality being crap and making little effort with update and improvement

If they are in a monopolistic position, why would they bother with the expense?

This is why I’m optimistic about ai based software engineering tools.

Speeds up development processes by a lot increasing the total the total amount of software produced and freeing. up resources to focus on ux/features/bug fixes.

Throwaway for reasons

The future is not native open source applications - it's cloud hosted productivity software with your data locked away, with your productivity a slave to outages, your bandwidth, and whatever features your license bequeaths.

This is what we're being asked to build by customers - I'm on a team doing this, and fought against it, but it's still going to happen. I know it's going to get flamed on Reddit and HN the next time the product makes the rounds, but internet comments aren't subscription dollars.

What do you mean? "Stadia" but for AutoCAD, Maya and Photoshop?

Not the OP, but this is already happening for the browser. See e.g. https://mightyapp.com/ that was posted to HN not too long ago.

It’s not shocking to hear that people are asking for stuff like this. But I agree with the commenter, that this represents regression in our industry, that consumer software is being taken away from the consumer.

Customers (read: working professionals who need to use Chrome/Creative Suite/whatever for their jobs) are driving this change. We can just hope it’s limited to professional software and not personal software. But who knows. :/

I hope we haven’t passed the peak of open, general computing.

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