Wanted: A Startup that Will Disrupt Adobe

I posted this because I hope some YC company will take up the torch and destroy Adobe. I'm a designed and I've worked with their products since the early 90s and I've gone from love to hate with Adobe. They've spent the last ten years larding on features on their suite of programs making them a pain to use -- and now they think the answer is using a cloud model as the ultimate dongle.

I realize that desktop software is un-sexy to you kids, but I'm telling you now that if someone created a basic suite of products and had the marketing budget to scale up that there is an audience of creatives who would love to switch.

In fact I've already avoided Adobe Edge in favor of Hype, so I know that someone can do the same thing with the other toolsets. And now more than ever Photoshop feels like Word Perfect...

Pricing in the UK is even worse; £210 per year for one app, or £560 per year for the suite. An expense that could have been done without...

It's one thing to charge this amount for an app that you use every day, but a lot of these are things that some people on the team only need every now and then. Like a developer slicing a new PSD for a few days and then not touching Photoshop for weeks.

For lots of cases like that, using the same version for years was a totally sensible approach.

I think it's startups plural, and going after different parts of the diverse Adobe user base.

In my case, my company Drifty (http://drifty.com/) is making simple web development tools that replace Dreamweaver, Edge Reflow, and the like, for a crowd that is less pro-dev/designer. Many of our customers tell us they pick our products over Adobe's.

We're trying! http://tumult.com/hype/ :)