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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

For all shit we give Adobe we have to give them credit. Over time their tools become incredibly good for productivity (even though they might suck hard in certain departments like performance). I've been around for long enough to see few of these. Freehand for example - there were tears and cries for help when they got ahold of it. Illustrator was shit at the time; Today it's awesome and an industry standard. Flash, same story. After Effects, same story. Premiere, same story. Indesign, same story. Etc.. Hard reason why most of those became industry standard was/is that Adobe understands how to cater to the user of those. Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User experience? The best. It's like with Microsoft and dev tools.

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I think that cuts both ways in that while they do incrementally improve the products, they never would be industry standard if not for Adobe pushing them. Also worth noting that a lot of their portfolio was acquired once it had been threatening their turf and becoming established (Macromedia early on, Figma most recently). Their Suite approach lets them float tools for awhile before determining if they're worthwhile to continue developing or if they need to be axed, or merged into existing products.

Another example of that would be Autodesk.

Small fix: over time some of their tools become incredibly good for productivity.

Because they have an excellent track record of completely ignoring the glaring problems with some of their apps like become slower even though cpus and gpus are getting faster (looking at you, Lightroom team)

> Performance sucks, yes. Stability? Sometimes as well. User experience? The best

Not sure how this makes sense. If the performance is not good, and the stability is lacking, then the user experience cannot be the best. I rather use a video editor that makes me go through two menus instead of one, rather than having a video editor that crashes on me or takes ages to generate the proxy clips (or even need proxy clips for 4K and below footage).

Right, but there's a threshold of how much pain is detrimental to the overall benefits. Performance and stability do suck, but not _that_ much.

OK I'm open to that side of things.

If Adobe pulls all the stops and produces value corresponding to what it charges, which is crazy--then, I might reconsider my views, maybe their business incentives have aligned very well now and they can become a virtuous monopoly.

You wouldn't know it from the comments on this site, though, my GOD, all negative yours is the first positive.

Further, Figma did a good thing for the end user by selling out to Adobe--at a very steep price. Their holding out for a huge price is virtuous, yes of course more money for them, but if you're selling out, charging a lot is virtuous, taking as big a bite as you can out of the giant.

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