Adobe at 40 | Hacker News Reader

Adobe at 40

fastcompany.com

88 pointsredbell65 comments

-Hi Adobe, I'd like to cancel my Creative Cloud subscription

-Ohhh we're sorry to see you leave. Would you like three extra months for free so that we can maybe change your mind?

-Okay, sure

-three months later: Hi Adobe, I'd like to cancel my Creative Cloud subscription

-Dear valued customer. If you want to cancel your subscription, please pay for 9 months of service since the offer you accepted three months ago signed you up for another full year.

Go to hell, Adobe.

Not surprising that the makers of InDesign would be a fine print company.

Jokes on them, the only reason i wanted to cancel was to switch to a student discount since i enrolled in some continuing education at a college and got an edu email

But instead they offered me those 3 months for free which lasted the whole semester

and then I got the student discount after

Did not get trapped into that year long thing

One of my favourite things they’ve done recently is remove support for TOTP. Now, if you want 2FA, you have to download their proprietary Adobe Account Security app. This in turn requires you to provide a phone number, because unlike TOTP there’s no alternative method of backup.

I really do wonder why they removed an easy-to-use, known, secure, and trusted standard in favour of a clunky app that’s ultimately only as secure as a phone number (in reality less so as DIY security always results in holes). More vendor lock-in? Another avenue to harvest data?

Not that it really affects me as I no longer use any Adobe products.

The answer is plain and simple: they want your phone number, your account security is not much of their concern.

I literally had to tell their customer support I had cancer to get them to cancel my sub. Will never get them another cent.

Wow, that’s a lot. I didn’t do that, but I did get very angry in a chat to convince them to partially refund subscription costs I believed were cheated out of my pocket.

I paid a stupid amount for a subscription I never used because Abode has annoyingly effective dark patterns in their trial/cancellation flow.

It’s kind of interesting to note that Adobe predates the Mac. An interesting bit of Adobe pre-history was that Donald Knuth used a pre-release version of PhotoShop at Adobe headquarters when he was putting together his book 3:16. He had it running on multiple Macs each processing a different scanned calligraphic rendering of a verse because the size of the image files was such that processing was painfully slow.

One interesting bit was on one of the scans, he changed a line break to more accurately reflect the sense of the text that was rendered. After the first edition went to press, he discovered that the calligrapher had rendered a Russian cross in the negative space¹ and his modification had obliterated this. Later editions made some other changes to line breaks to restore the Russian cross.

⸻

1. This account is from my potentially inaccurate recollection of Knuth’s talk at the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco. It might have been a cross of Lorraine and it might have been the words that formed the cross and not the negative space.

Adobe is the most malicious company I've ever dealt with. My wife needed to use PS & LR in a couple of occasion and I checked the monthly subscription it looked only around $20/m or something and did not realize it was actually an ANNUAL COMMITMENT with a monthly price tag. Note that I checked everywhere but I still did not find out the fact. At this stage it might be me to blame. And soon I completely forgot about it. Then just a couple of days over a year, I noticed that there were payments to Adobe on my credit card statement. So I asked my wife was she still using it and she said, ahhhh, nope, I finished with it just after couple of days. Okay, so we paid Adobe 11 months for nothing. Thus I contacted Adobe to cancel the subscription and got told please pay us another 11 months as you did not cancel before the last day of the year... What?! I challenged that and the support actually help to cancel without incurring additional charges to my card.

I thought that was the end of the story. But when I tried to uninstall it, the installer asked me to login. Entered my credentials, did not work. Double checked by trying to login to the website, the credentials were actually correct. Googled and found their dedicated clean up tool to do it, which did not work neither. Eventually had to manually remove the master installation info from registry and use the other tools to remove their bloated packages one by one. I thought I had clean up all their sh*t but after reboot there was still a couple of services running even after deleting the installation folder. The only thing as hard to remove was a virus.

I'm reminded of the time I tried Lightroom around the time Apple announced that Aperture was being discontinued. It was unusably slow on the laptop I was using at the time — which was impressive given that Aperture had been perfectly usable — and I had to spend 20 minutes telling their support rep that I wasn't going to buy a new computer just to run Creative Cloud.

Photoshop was a great tool but they've spent years burning the boats moving away from the “bicycle for the mind”-era feeling which got them fans 20+ years ago.

I’m still sad about the loss of Aperture

It was the one app I used Mac for, with it gone there was no reason to stick with Mac.

Never fear! You can still run it and a few other apps:

https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

“ Run Aperture, iPhoto, and iTunes on macOS Ventura, macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, and macOS Catalina. Xcode 11.7 on macOS Mojave. Final Cut Pro 7, Logic Pro 9, and iWork ’09 on macOS Mojave or macOS High Sierra.”

That’s impressive! I wouldn’t trust things I care about to an unsupported workflow but that must have been a fair amount work dealing with the deprecated APIs.

This is brilliant! Being able to use these apps again is gold

I'll never use proprietary software like Adobe in my work flow ever again. I recently switched from Windows to Linux[1] for the same reasons and will never go back. Many of these companies are hostile to there custom base, no reason to support them. I have moved on to supporting development teams behind Inkscape, Mozilla and Obsidian. People behind these projects seem like they care about where the future of software is heading.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

This thread reminded me of three things.

1. I have always been afraid to cancel my Adobe subscription that gets me Photoshop

2. I bought the Affinity Suite months ago

3. Why not cancel my Adobe subscription, burn the ships, and give Affinity a REAL try. I can always go back.

Just did that. I still like PS better and I haven’t found a good alternative for LR. I may go back - but I’m giving it a try.

Same problem for me. Photoshop? Don't care, plenty of options. Lightroom? Nothing's really an adequate replacement, not least because most of the tools touted as replacements are a lot more concerned about the "digital darkroom" fucking-around-with-RAW-settings aspect that the asset management side of things.

For digital asset management I use ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac. I’m pretty satisfied.

Is ACDSee Photo Studio a good bet for managing metadata on video assets too, do you happen to know? I’ve been looking for a good asset manager to complement my FCPX workflow for ages, seems like a largely abandoned space on Mac.

I don’t know. I don’t do any video.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

I'm not sure your specific workflow in Lightroom, I admiditly haven't used it since 2008 I suspect. However I'd maybe suggest trying some of the other modern RAW tools, I'm personally been editing with CaptureOne as I got a serial with my Fuji camera. Usually when I want to start getting crazy with masking I'll jump into Photoshop or the likes pretty quick, personally.

Capture One Pro is pretty good and even slightly better than Lightroom at making colors pop

I haven't tried Affinity Photo but Affinity Designer has been a pleasant surprise. Worth the non-recurring $50 investment. I want to like Inkscape, but there are just too many quirks still. PDF output from Designer so far always looks great. My primary use case is putting together figures for scientific papers.

Just gonna say it a better world would be one where they didn’t make it to 50.

Garbage company. Garbage products.

Will never forgive Figma for burning the one chance this decade we had to dethrone them.

Adobe, please allow me stop your spyware from automatically spinning up a dozen processes every time my computer starts even when I don’t plan on opening one of your astonishingly terrible applications. Thanks!

I don’t think my opinion of Adobe could be lower than now and I wonder what the founders 40 years ago would think of the current version of Adobe. Their “subscriptions out the wazoo” model is cancerous. I remember I had an Adobe Photoshop (can’t remember the version) disc and it meant the program was mine to use forever. Our transaction was done when I bought it and it did pretty much everything I needed Photoshop to do.

It's awful. I'm glad that there are up and coming alternatives Adobe haven't bought and ruined yet though.

Affinity are doing some great stuff, can't praise them enough.

There's the odd tiny thing I'd miss Adobe for, but between their prices, their business practices, and the invasive software there's really no comparison any more.

Adobe employs more dark patterns in their rebill/subscription products than any other established company I've dealt with. I go out of my way to avoid them now. It doesn't surprise me that they had to pay such a premium for Figma.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.adobe.com

They've earned these 1.2 stars.

No. They have not. They deserve 0 stars. I am sure there is some truly 1.2 star company out there with better customer service and company policies.

I think Oracle is holding a beer to Adobe :)

I hate them and yet I pay for it because I have 20 years of sunk cost in learning Photoshop and Illustrator. I execute very complex editing in those apps as a reflex/on autopilot. I'm sure it's the same for many others.

I’m very much less experienced but have really enjoyed the Affinity apps, especially the illustrator replacement.

As much as I loathe subscription models for things like this, I turn my sub on and off as needed. That Photoshop + bundle CD cost me $1200 in 2008. Now I pay $20/mo which = 5 years until I reach that CD cost. It's not usually my profession, so most months I don't use it.

I miss that CD. I told Adobe (in my head) that I'm stealing their software until I can afford to pay for it. Then I could, so I did.

From what I'm seeing, Photoshop only costs $20/month (actually $20.99) if you commit to an annual plan. It's $31.49/month if you want month-to-month.

And in the past, every time I've wanted to cancel a subscription, I've had to spend ~30 minutes with their support. How are you able to turn it on and off so easily? I'd love to figure out a way to avoid their normal cancelation flow.

I had an annual plan last year that was 50% off for new users (easy, use a new email) and I canceled it online this year, no problem. I had a 12 month commitment but just set a reminder to cancel in month 11. No problem. This was better than past experiences.

(I also get CC from work which negated me needing another subscription.)

Isn’t the Photo plan that includes Photoshop only $10?

Yes. Though it's easy to miss.

With a forever license, the incentive is a bit too weak for continual security patches.

It's not like everyone buys it on the same day, and never buys anything else from them. If they don't fix security issues new customers will refuse to buy the product.

Besides in the old days you could still buy a "maintenance" agreement for your product, which entitled you to x months of upgrades. You would still own the licence, though.

As Khaled Mardam-Bey recently discovered.

I don't need security fixes for Lightroom or Photoshop... Like my camera is not going to start hiding viruses in photos all of a sudden.

It has less to do with your camera injecting viruses. There are other attack surfaces. For instance someone could send you a malicious Jpeg and if your Adobe application has a vulnerability and you decide to open that file, it could be exploited.

Sure, but I don’t use photoshop or Lightroom for images I didn’t create.

That of course is true as a user but do you realize Adobe never had a negative quarter?

Same feeling, I really hope Adobe is disrupted and destroyed soon

If anything machine learning researchers will finally acchive something worthwhile by killing the company off

Amen! waiting for that day to come

Adobe software could literally poke you through the eyeball every time you use it and people will still go "What am I going to use instead? GIMP can't hold a candle to Photoshop."

Though I actually got my sister hooked on Krita as a Windows tablet replacement for ProCreate.

For those interested there is a book about the "Early Days" at Adobe.

https://archive.org/details/insidepublishing00pfif

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Publishing-Revolution-Adobe-St...

"if you ever cancel my paid-for Illustrator bundle from ten years ago, that I use on a stable OSX 10.4, I will hand out t-shirts in front of your SF building for months on end, declaring every bit of the way I was treated" -- signed a previously happy Adobe customer from the 90s

Funnily enough the Adobe building in SF isn't where they have their Creative Cloud division. It's where they have their Experience Cloud division (aka ads). The Creative Cloud division is still mostly in San Jose.

That isn't 100% true at least. My friend worked in their SF office on Adobe XD.

Funny there's no mention of Flash.

Well Flash was developed by Macromedia, which was then later bought by Adobe so I don't think it is as relevant for Adobes early days as some of the other things.

Macromedia actually acquired Flash as well, the original program was FutureSplash which was bought and re-branded by Macromedia, but this was a very early version

I’m just thankful the closest I got to Adobe was installing Acrobat reader on a PC when I was a humanities student. After switching to software development I have never had to use Creative Suite or Creative Cloud.

I wonder if any Adobe users have tried some other options for some programs (Gimp, Inkscape, Krita), and if suits their needs.

GIMP is a non-starter, no CMYK, no Adjustment Layers.

I've tried Inkscape and GIMP. I'm sure they must be great pieces of software, but their usability is so awful it renders them useless for me. And they're not great options if your client provides/asks for adobe proprietary files (psds, ais...)

nice article!

I couldn’t see the article past the full screen autoplay video, so I’ll have to take your word that there was any relevant content in that page.

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