Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think that's a correct analysis.

Adobe is very good at building software. It's not the problem. It's not that Adobe can't compete with Figma. It's that they don't want to.

Adobe has a great engineering team and ships wonderful products. The problem with Adobe is that the business side is anticompetitive, exploitative, and sleazy. Buying Figma, they lose a competitor. Competitors have a nasty tendency to expand to adjacent markets, and that's the sort of thing Adobe likes to nip as early as possible.

If not for their business practices, I would totally buy Adobe products, because they're great.

As is, I don't know if Adobe won't triple prices tomorrow for me to continue to be able to edit my own documents (once they know I'm locked in), or find some other way to !@#$ me up the !@#$. The slight hit to product quality going to competing products and open-source is more than made up for with the stability of having a reliable business partner, or source code I can build myself, respectively.

> Adobe is very good at building software.

Is that actually true? XD attempted to directly compete with Sketch and Figma, and was not generally considered to be a success at that primarily because they couldn’t ship features fast enough to catch up.

At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos).

> This is especially true for After Effects

Or Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat...

I know, Affinity exists but as everybody in the graphic industry has learned on Adobe software, switching over is hard.

> At the same time, however, Adobe maintains products with no clear competitors due to their quality. This is especially true for After Effects (for motion graphics in videos).

Really not sure if this is true. Probably due more to "network effects". It's hard to compete with Photoshop or Illustrator if everyone is familiar with their UIs and has all their files as PSDs or Illustrator files. Also anyone who would be reasonably close to creating a good competitor would be bought.

Take a look at their five other industry-leading products. UX design was never their forté, but they have the rest of the design world in the bag.

As a former designer, I can tell you from experience that the designers I encountered would much rather have the newest tools at their hand for a subscription fee than be behind in software. There's so much the competitors cannot do (or can't do well), and if your prodcut doesn't work on a subscription model you're never going to be giving the latest features away in updates.

Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period.

Premier is, well, the premier photo editing app.

Every designer knows illustrator. UX/UI is just a subset of design.

Many web developers who were around before the HTML5 era will swear by Dreamweaver.

> Photoshop is one of the best pieces of software, period.

FWIW, painting is one of the easiest pieces of software to get right. As much as I couldn't replicate the volume of stuff Adobe has done in 30+ years, I could build the bones of Photoshop in a few months, with modular extensibility frameworks to slot everything else in.

Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today.

The basic data model is a grid of pixels, organized with layers, and having masks, and an extensible set of tools to operate on them. You also need a little bit of "other" for things like editable text, before it is flattened into the above. Add modular tools and filters, and you're 90% of the way there.

Most of the value-add of Photoshop is simply developer time to add a comprehensive set of tools. Adobe can hire a researcher to tweak some algorithm for years, and at this point they've got a lot.

Basic video editing is similar. Linear streams, in layers, with modular filters and effects.

I'm much more impressed with Adobe drawing tools, page layout, and animation. That's HARD because there aren't the same kinds of clean data models and abstractions. These are harder to use, and don't feel as polished, but that's not because they're less well-written, but because they solve a harder problem. I could NOT build the core of that myself in a reasonable amount of time.

> Indeed, GIMP did much the same thing. They messed up a few things (like color models), which continue to haunt it (even the ones which were retroactively fit back in), but it's not any more work to do it right. If they had, it'd be very competitive with Photoshop today.

Ask any designer and they’ll laugh at you for bringing up in Gimp compared to Photoshop. Photoshop is 10x better. It’s easy to say it’s easy to make Photoshop, but they didn’t. It’s like a poor person saying it’s easy to be a millionaire if they wanted to.

Premiere is a piece of trash that crashes on first breath. Adobe also operated Flash for quite a long time. Another amazingly engineered product, supposedly. I do not think your assesment of Adobe's engineers are accurate.

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