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Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

But this is the thing, it’s not healthy to see Adobe as the permanent enemy. They are a reflection of their people and leadership and this is arguably a sign they are a changing company.

Your analogy once was true with Microsoft and Visual Studio in the 90s. It was the main IDE for Windows development (there was no Linux, not really). And it was expensive. There wasn’t much competition until Java took off.

These days Microsoft isn’t seen as the enemy as often. Github is doing fine for example. Companies can change.

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> But this is the thing, it’s not healthy to see Adobe as the permanent enemy

- I used Fireworks every day in my job, they killed it.

- After Effects was a top 3 digital creative tool ever made, they let it rot till it's a janky shadow of its former self, it can't even the timeline without audio glitches making ANY audio work to animation impossible, same can be said for Photoshop, can't even save an image without it trying to force you onto their dropbox competitor.

- They had the perfect entry point tool for multimedia creation with Flash that a whole generation of teens learnt how to express themselves online with and they let parts of it rot because they saw it as nothing more than a videoplayer and enterprise app Java competitor.

How are they not my enemy, we're talking decades of attacks on my workflow at this point.

Because Adobe is just a shifting group of people over time. It’s not a fixed entity with consistent motives. They bought Figma, you can assume the worst (that’s fair) but it’s equally likely they’re not spending $20b to kill it.

No one is expecting them to kill it.

didn't Apple kill flash by never supporting it on iOS? maybe there is more to the story.

>Apple kill flash by never supporting it on iOS

Apple tried very hard to support Flash on the iPhone. Apple flew out Adobe engineers to help them get it work on mobile. It was a tire fire and that's why Apple killed it. The dysfunction with Flash started before the iPhone, and arguably started with the acquisition of Macromedia.

It was already dying. Every web dev in the world hated it, and so did most of the users. But the worst offense was having proprietary closed source binary that couldn't be audited, running untrusted code on end devices. For instance, if you're on any OS other than Mac or Windows, you'd have a bad time, and often have no option to use flash sites (at the time, it was common to build flash sites even for simple document-style web pages). It was a security nightmare, but it was also a stability nightmare. When I saw Steve Jobs announcement I was so relieved. It was a bold move at the time, iPhone was nowhere near as dominant as it is today.

Microsoft actually cared about the developers. They also cared about the right things from business point of view. Their backwards compatibility is and was always insane.

The irony is that Microsoft gave us freedom, Apple gave us lockdowns.

I disagree pretty strongly with that last statement. Microsoft was the enemy of many developers through the 90s, every startup was in mortal fear that Microsoft would put you out of business by “embrace, extend, extinguish”. They were far worse than Apple in their practices. And Apple products were always far more user friendly.

Maybe the difference between Adobe and Microsoft is that the latter has kind of proven itself now. In the meantime is Adobe very busy trying to separate the Open Source version of Magento from the paid version, called Adobe Commerce now. There is only one mention of Magento left on the homepage, about the name change. And is a link to the free version now where to be found.

Enemies are permanent until they die, not until you get tired.

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