Adobe Has Rid Itself of Its Allies ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel:

Thirteen years ago, I sat in an amphitheater in Los Angeles as Adobe announced that it would be shifting from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. I remember being skeptical, but I was also willing to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt. After all, it created a beloved line of tools.

[…]

I was giving Adobe every benefit of the doubt, because I wanted to see this work. I think it’s important to recognize why I felt that way and what has changed in the last five years.

This follows the critical takes from Macworld and AppleInsider about Apple’s App Store policies as an industry voice pushing back on corporate behaviour. I have no idea if articles like these raise alarm bells for executives and decision-makers — but they should.

I have a quibble with Schneider’s article:

Adobe’s product is largely blameless. The product is, for the most part, not just good — it’s great. The promises Adobe made 13 years ago have been largely upheld from a product perspective. But it’s not enough to just make a good product, especially when you’re catering to artists.

I think Adobe has actually shipped worse products as a result of this strategy — and, for once, I will avoid making it all about bugs, of which there are many. Adobe’s applications are more capable than they ever have been, but they are also often worse for professionals in actual use as a direct result of the company’s software-as-a-service model. Nearly every application contains upsells or supposedly helpful alerts that are actually ads for other Adobe services. These promotions are particularly aggressive in pushing artificial intelligence tools. Even software as relatively simple as Acrobat cannot help but promote its ability to summarize a two-page document, and then suggest you store it with Adobe’s cloud service instead of sending it as an attachment.

This stuff gets in the way of professionals trying to do their job. Adobe was pressured into adding a “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop to hide most of these things, but not all of them, and only in Photoshop. It only underscores how much Adobe views its software as something it gives people permission to use, instead of tools it makes to help people get their work done.