Apple, Microsoft, Sony…it’s cool to hate them but can we please direct some fucking ire to this absolute pinnacle of piece of shittery that’s always on the frontier of the shittiest business practices in all things IT?
How has this compamy escaped a class action lawsuit by the entire population of the world?
It’s crazy to me that Adobe has managed to to make any money. Their software products at their core are pretty solid, however all of their products are covered in barbed wire and throned vines. The idea that basic features require a subscription is beyond bonkers to me. I don’t know how they managed to survive the 90s at all.
I hate Adobe, all my homies hate Adobe, and it’s deeply frustrating there has not been a meaningful alterative yet.
businesses buy the licenses for their employees
the affinity suite is a good alternative if you’re not on linux, not that adobe supports linux last i checked. There’s also https://www.photopea.com/ Really depends on the use case, plenty of better painting options out there now. For photo editing, a dedicated raw editor can cover a lot of territory. For compositing heavy stuff, I use gimp or even blender. inkscape is awesome for vector work.
i could go on. i think a lot of people forget how difficult it was to learn adobe software when they started, and it’s tough to switch and lose that muscle memory, but even if the alternatives aren’t as good, most have been improving over the years and adobe has just gotten worse and worse. Redirecting money from adobe to alternatives will accelerate that.
It’s also much easier to write scripts for adobe alternatives, so it’s possible to get productivity boosts in that domain, depending on how you work.
They survived the 90’s because they weren’t subscription-based back then. They could charge a lot more, but they had to actually invest in development so that clients would be willing to pay for an upgrade. Once development started stagnating, and they had an enormous market share, they could switch over to the subscription model and start charging people to access the software (and their files) in perpetuity.
That one thing I hate about technology as it is. It’s not modern tech is inherently bad, it’s that technology is engineered around becoming more profitable rather than better. They aren’t making better products anymore, they just finding new ways to charge you for them. UGH.