Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.
That was fine for years. Now it is a car park.
True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.
However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.
What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:
Adobe is led by a bunch of dickheads who are
alienating their customers. We think there's an
opportunity for a more enlightened competitor
to take market share.
Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!
And it may not be one company. It may be one for image editing, one for illustration, one for graphic design, and so on. There are really good tools out there today, but "everybody uses Adobe" so everybody uses adobe. Every one of these events (especially when Adobe costs your company money but refuses to provide any kind of remuneration) is one step closer to people saying "I'm going to learn something else".
To prevent that is what patents are for.
That's a big assumption there
It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.
Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.
Photoshop is really for the professional image editor - I can't believe that the average consumer really can't get by with pixelmator/acorn.
In the end, they'll still stay on Adobe's CC.
We don't just crop, resize and apply some blur.
Looks like great software, but there's no Windows version I can see.
I'd argue that alternatives to Photoshop and After Effects are the killer apps needed for getting most people out of Adobe's ecosystem. The OS X specific alternatives for Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator, etc) just aren't quite there yet. I really, really want them to be though because I've held off on upgrading from CS4 for about as long as I can.
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke-product-family/nuk...
Unfortunately, it's a wee bit more expensive. But I wonder if we'll see a price drop soon...