Adobe Acquires Photo-Editing Platform Aviary | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Acquires Photo-Editing Platform Aviary

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139 pointszabalmendi61 comments

Surprising negativity in here, an observation to consider: HN tends to be biased regarding acquisitions. Some companies, like Google or Apple, are praised for sage decisions and invaluable acqui-hires. Others, like Yahoo and Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products or otherwise flailing capital.

As i see it, Adobe identified a group of devs uniquely qualified to bring domain knowledge to their team, as well as mobile expertise they may have lacked. This strikes me as a reasonable strategic move on their part.

I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe.

Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service?

People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the time being.

come on, that's just crazy, Aviary is no competition for Adobe. There are a million photo editing apps, and Aviary is one of them, but Adobe is the giant gorilla in the game, the go-to software for designers and photographers.

I think you're making an analogous comparison, which is not necessarily the right one.

Aviary needs to compete not on features so much as audience. If Aviary can do 80% of what Adobe does for some % of users and it convinces those users to eschew their CC subscription, they are a competitor.

In other words, it's less the product and more the people.

You must not have visited the Adobe forums in recent times. A sizable chunk of Creative Suite developers highly dislikes Creative Cloud (you can only get new versions via a subscription). So, many of them are probably on the lookout for alternatives.

As a longtime Lightroom user, I am happy that the most recent version can still be purchased as a standalone license. But they certainly seem to be steering people to the subscription model there as well.

I'm not sure I agree with "Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe." Yes, Aviary offers image editing apps for mobile, but that's a very competitive market. There are lots of image-editing and image-sharing apps for mobile.

Aviary's special sauce is something I don't think Adobe even has: a way for developers to quickly add a photo editor to their app or website (i.e. a photo editor SDK).

I think the competition is Sketch and Pixate.

Would you mind providing links to both of those? I googled for "sketch" but would rather be sure I have what everyone is talking about.

EDIT: Ok, this [1] and [2] would seem to be what everyone is talking about. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[1] -- http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/ [2] -- http://www.pixate.com

Until I saw your link, I thought everyone was referring to Skitch, the much more limited graphic editor. I was surprised that it was seen as competition.

https://evernote.com/skitch/

Pixate? How is Pixate in any way a competitor to Photoshop? It's a completely different product. Are you thinking of Pixelmator?

http://www.pixelmator.com/

Wouldn't closer competition be something like GIMP?

Not sure I believe Aviary was the main visible competition to Adobe.

As far as photo editing software goes, I've been a hobbyist and part time photographer for a while, and I'm not sure I've ever heard of Aviary. When people recommend alternatives to Photoshop, I hear about Pixelmator, GIMP, Paintshop Pro, and a few others, but I don't remember ever hearing of Aviary.

To me, it doesn't seem like Aviary competes with Adobe directly at all. They're probably eating into the market of people who apply a few filters and upload to Flickr, but not many of those people use LightRoom or PhotoShop anyway. Even then, it's small fries compared to the pro/hobbyist Photographer market, and those people aren't going to use a web based editor because of IP issues and the inconvenience of uploading gigabytes of RAW files.

Also remember Adobe is huge and has products for document editing and video editing and other stuff. It doesn't look like Aviary does anything in those areas.

> Others, like Yahoo and Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products or otherwise flailing capital.

Yahoo destroys everything it touches, except Flick (which could have been Instagram before there was Instagram...but settled on just being good enough to stay alive).

Adobe makes a lot of bloated, expensive products of questionable value. It's not a horrible company, but nobody would benefit from them having a monopoly.

Let's be clear: a mobile photo editing app is in not a Photoshop competitor. Adobe products are created for professionals. They are not bloated, they are filled with tons of features that save artists time. Case in point: watch a photoshop keynote and see the crowd reactions.

As for yahoo, you have done well to demonstrate my point concisely.

   Adobe products are created for professionals.

This is undoubtedly the case. What boggles the mind, though, is that a company, which caters to pros first forces them into the cloud, to then run into a massive outage, which renders those products, on which pros rely, useless. For hours, or days. [1]

Let's also not forget the Dmitry Sklyarov affair, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. And I believe, rightfully so. [2]

Their online security also doesn't seem quite up to scratch for a company priding itself on its offerings for professionals.

There are a lot of reasons to intensely dislike Adobe as a company without even looking at their product offerings.

[1] http://www.techrepublic.com/article/adobe-creative-cloud-out...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._ElcomSoft_and_...

The Licensing component is in the cloud, not the software.

The "outage" was by-passable by dropping your internet connection when you opened the app(s). (Not ideal, but still a decent work-around).

What has "online security" got to do with Desktop publishing and photo editing (neither of which occur online)?

What are the reasons to intensely dislike them for?

There is not even a decent competitor to Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign (Pixelmator and Sketch are both great, but not anywhere near the breadth of Adobe's products... and that still leaves InDesign)... So if you 'intensely dislike' them and think they are so inadequate, then surely you can disrupt them fairly easily, no?

It's very sad to see Aviary go and didn't choose to continue pushing their web editors to a more advanced audience and photo hobbyists. If they're abandoning plans moving forward in the web, Polarr (https://www.polarr.co/) might just be the last player trying to push web photo editing experience. It always seems like the web has not done with photo processing yet though companies are all jumping into mobile these days or moving on to video processing.

Just signed up and find Polarr is probably a much better on-line photo editing platform for me. It is what I call Lightroom-on-demand! Plus, there are much more potentials for its intelligent personal style learning.

Gotta say I'm surprised this didn't happen years ago when Aviary made all those flash-based web tools for editing Vectors, photos, etc...

I'm really shocked this didn't happen months ago actually. Seemed like a very logical fit for Adobe. I just hope they don't ruin Aviary now.

Honestly I expected this to happen 2+ years ago. Glad to hear the Aviary team held on, since I never heard of anyone paying/using for their amazing tools (which were cutting edge back when they launched).

I have to worry every time Adobe makes an acquisition. Seldom do the products improve.

I don't think they've screwed up Typekit at all.

Is that a joke? For me, it's now intrusive: I can't turn off Typekit notifications and suggestions, even though I use Suitcase Fusion.

Flash Professional improved. Typekit improved and I would say Behance has improved. I know it's cool to crap on Adobe but they've gotten a lot better in recent years.

EDIT Changed Illustrator to Flash Professional. Forgot which was an acquisition.

You mean Photoshop, not Illustrator, improved? The latter was Adobe's first app and lovingly crafted by Warnock and crew.

(I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. ;-)

Ah yeah, I don't know why I said Illustrator. I might have been thinking of the Flash Professional program, which has improved but Flash itself is on its way out.

Fireworks is dead,dreamweaver almost ... and no Fireworks isnt the same product as Photoshop or Illustrator.As for flash they are removing drawing tools that are "redundant" with Illustrator.So no,everything hasnt been a lot better in recent years...

Perhaps even more troublesome, seems Adobe is buying out a company that provides or could develop competing software. Judging by discussions here there's been a lot of dissatisfaction with Adobe's retrenchment to "cloud-only" SaaS policies, and alternatives are sparse.

Likely it's not accidental that there's essentially no competition in the professional graphics software arena where Adobe products dominate. This acquisition gives the appearance of Adobe trying to maintain its monopoly, and I'm inclined to think it's not really a healthy development.

Though the adoption has fallen, ActionScript 3 was a near strict improvement over 2, and it was released a good while after the Macromedia acquisition.

It was primarily developed at Macromedia, if you don't count that Waldemar Horwat and others greatly influenced its design via the whole JS2/ES4 situation in the years prior. That's why AVM2's IR used to be called the Macromedia Intermediate Representation, for example.

There were public betas available about 6 months after the acquisition, which didn't leave Adobe much time to change anything. Even the main APIs, like those in playerglobal.swc, almost all have a copyright stamp of 2005 in them.

COSA After Effects has come a long way!

There really isn't any other software to compete at this point. Aviary and Gimp were the only Photoshop competitors. Inkscape and Aviary were the only Illustrator competitors.

Is sketch considered more of an Illustrator competitor?

Pixelmator is the best photoshop replacement IMO.

I like & use Pixelmator too, but it's really a Photoshop Elements competitor.

Depends on your usage, I guess. I haven't used Photoshop Elements, but Pixelmator does 90% of what I used to use Photoshop for, from photo editing, color correction and retouching to prep for web. Really only go to Photoshop for certain filters, serious masking and color contortions. I use it more than I used to use Photoshop as it got bloated, and Pixelmator launches in a flash.

Acorn is also really nice. Of course, it's more lightweight than Photoshop (in the positive and negative senses).

There is a reason for this. It makes no sense to make a photoshop competitor as this is not where we are heading.

Instead we are heading towards vectors as the primary asset which means toward visual editors that allow for scripting and much more granular control off assets such as animiation.

In 5-10 years ex. Sketch and other much more dynamic environments will be one of the de-facto standards as the older generations retire and the new ones come in.

Photoshop is the Quark of our time and it's heading for retirement I think.

P.S. I am part of the older generation and still uses Illustrator and sometimes Photoshop. I loved Fireworks but Adobe killed it.

However, having played around with Sketch I think I see where things are heading.

Photoshop is for editing photos, not for drawing "assets". Unless you are trying to tell me that digital cameras will produce a vector drawing of scenes, I don't see bitmap editing software going away anytime soon, or ever.

Photoshop is not used primarily for editing photos in the software industry from my experience. In a world with responsive design needs vector based just gives you more versions of assets at different resolutions for less effort than any other approach.

Sure photo editing is one use for it. But much of it is in creating icons, mockups, non photo realistic things, and more.

How Photoshop is used doesn't really matter - it's intended as a photo editing product. Adobe already has an illustration / vector product and there's a reason they're separate.

How it's intended is most certainly what doesn't matter given how many people use it for other things than photo-editing.

First, I'd say "most people" is anecdotal and supposition.

Second, even if "most people" used Microsoft Word to build web pages I wouldn't treat it like a web IDE.

Which is why I never said it was that categorically so why the strawman?

But you know being a designer having worked with designers, having had a large design agency and done some work for Adobe I do consider myself fairly informed on the matter.

Whether you wanted to consider it a web IDE is besides the point. I remember the days when notepad was considered the gold standard.

If it helps you get the work done who care about what it was supposed to help them with.

I think you possibly have a limited perspective on what people are using photoshop, I'm pretty sure every professional photographer uses it in some way or another, for instance as are print designers.

?? I am saying it's being used for other things than photo-editing how is that a limited perspective?

I am well aware what photoshop can do and can't do having used it since it's early days.

You are however missing the point here.

Photoshop is being used for web design and app design as much if not more and have also added things like vectors to it's suite of tools to reflect that.

It's has nothing to do with whether bitmap editing goes aware but with what is going to be the de facto standard. If anything post-processing of images have removed much of the need for the core functionality of photoshop and will be easily re-produced by other editors.

You know I don't mind being downvoted if I talk about things I have no idea about and which are flat out wrong.

But please tell me why this comment deserve a down-vote?

I couldn't believe it when a colleague mentioned the other day I could open a video in Photoshop. I was convinced he was joking... but sure enough, you drag one in and get a timeline where you can scrub about it. I was shocked. Surprisingly since then, this feature has actually become quite handy for me in certain situations.

We're still tied to Adobe products like Illustrator and Phototshop, but to your point more than half of the product comps we do now we do in Sketch

In my field (Product Design/UI/UX) Photoshop seems to be falling out of popularity. It's being replaced with apps like Sketch and even frameworks like Framerjs.com. Photoshop is very poor for Product Design. These other applications are doing a great job of giving designers what they really want (easily repeatable elements, more precise measuring, better plugins, svg, etc).

I know the Product Design market may not be one of Adobe's bigger ones but it's refreshing to see it being used less and less.

If Aviary owns any patents in the photo-editing realm, those alone were worth the acquisition to Adobe. Aviary has active partnerships with Yahoo! Mail and others, as their primary built-in photo-editing default utility. The second part of the win for Adobe, is they can now slather the Adobe brand, all over where the Aviary brand is now prominent, in those partnerships. That's what matters to the money folks.

nice. I think it's just a question of time until someone makes a web based Photoshop killer again though. Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC)

I think a web based killer is very far away in the time line. I recently was trying to make a huge gird in Photoshop and my i7+10gbRAM computer was unable to handle it. I think very simple stuff like annotating and cropping/red-eye fix can be done but I think a web based photo editor will fail when huge performance is required.

Not sure what your exact setup was, but your graphics card might simply have run out of memory. Which would then have happened pretty much independently from the software you were using.

>Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC)

I don't think it's much. I imagine most of the revenue, or at least where the healthy margins are, is the marketing and publishing clouds. Extremely lucrative enterprise software.

Is a web based photoshop something anyone needs? (I'm talking an app with comparable features, not a basic photo editor).

You don't need feature parity - even if it initially served the needs of 20-30% of Photoshop users, it would be a threat to Adobe.

The feasibility barrier and cost of building a web app with some of the feature set of Photoshop is getting lower and lower.

If the transfer speed is an issue, it could work on local files - most of the code could be client side.

...and here we go:

http://gravit.io/

This took to long to happen, Congrats for them.

Anybody knows the deal amount?

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