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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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