Adobe Is Cooked | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Is Cooked

malejandro.com

35 pointsarecsu18 comments

This article captures my feelings 100%. Enough good will has been burned that I'm willing to suffer worse products or higher prices from others than to deal with Adobe again. But you don't have to put up with worse, you actually can have a lot better than Adobe products! This article doesn't mention the competition but Da Vinci Resolve is taking over the next generation of users right now.

Hey! Author here. Glad we're feeling the same. At the very end I've linked to another page where I maintain an organic list of software and interesting bits of internet that I admire and find useful as a creative, for other creatives alike.

Just today for the purposes of ending my blog post in a good light I created the Software category in the directory, to list every alternative I found interesting to Adobe's offerings.

Here the direct link to it! https://martyr.shop/directory/#software

Personally, I use Affinity, Resolve, Darktable, Blender, and Figma. This pretty much covers any visual creative endeavor I have, very comfortably. As a side project, I'm creating patches for Wine to make Affinity work much better under Linux, because Microsoft is also smelling much like Adobe :)

Double digit growth in YoY revenue for past ten years, YoY net income stable growth as well, with 28% last year alone. I wish I was cooked like that. Adobe's going nowhere soon, their stock will find grounding soon enough. Adobe always swims, like Autodesk.

“Such and such is cOoKeD” as a title is almost always a sign of low-effort writing.

Do you know that Adobe has an entire martech side of the business that is 25% of revenues and growing? I feel highly skeptical of any analysis that try’s to translate their personal experience into a prognosis of business prospects. There are tons of products of a business you never encounter but have enduring competitive moats.

This is wishful thinking. We shouldn’t allow such nonsensical bait titles on here.

I thought Adobe was boned 15 years ago (2011) when they debuted Creative Cloud and it was universally despised while their stranglehold on PDF manipulation was already well on its way out, yet here they are still alive and kicking. I chalk it up to the inertia of big dumb orgs that would rather keep paying for a piece of crap they're familiar with than risk trying something new.

A few years ago we had issues deleting some PDF files because they were in use, well, it turns out Creative Cloud agent decided to upload confidential PDF files to cloud for no particular reason, a service you cannot even turn off.

Except for the whole PDF-industrial complex. Adobe has a long life ahead (maybe a sad one) as long as PDFs are the document format of choice.

PDF is an ISO standard now.

Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?

It's been open and free on Adobe's website for 20+ years, aside from proprietary extensions like XFA. It's the ISO standards that until recently required payment (as that's how ISO generally works).

In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible.

In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.

My workplace uses it for documents that need digital signatures.

Acrobat is an awful piece of software.

I occasionally use a few obscure Acrobat Pro features, mostly in the preflight tool with a UI that looks as though it hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration.

And I occasionally use Acrobat Distiller to convert old PostScript files to PDF, and to embed fonts into old PDF files created without embedded fonts, mostly because I already have it set up to find and embed almost every pre-OpenType outline font ever released by Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft, along with the OpenType fonts in Adobe Font Folio 11.1, and I've never gotten around to setting up all the fonts in Ghostscript.

The only Adobe product I use more than once or twice a month at this point is Photoshop, and mostly for things that almost certainly could just as easily be done in any number of other image editors at this point, or even ImageMagick. It's just that I've been using Photoshop since version 2 (not CS2 ca. 2005, Photoshop 2.0 ca. 1991), so it's comfortable.

It has been since 2008.

Oh the sad irony!

I have to work with ISO-purchased pdf documents that are heavily DRM-controlled. I can only open them on two PCs with a plugin that only works in Acrobat reader. It is so closed and unusable.

They’re leaning so hard into that, if you’ve heard their podcast ads.

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