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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

The downfall of Adobe is interesting to watch. New releases get more expensive every year, but they aren't really adding features. I had to switch to Affinity to get an iPad version, for example. 21,000 employees and they can't port Photoshop to ARM? I think at this point, they're just coasting on brand recognition alone. They certainly aren't adding much value; all they can do is rent you their software at higher and higher prices every year and hope nobody notices. The subscription cancellation shenanigans just show how bad their software is -- people will pay them money to not be able to use their software anymore. If that's not a hallmark of a dying company, I don't know what is.

I'm surprised they haven't started suing people over range check functions yet.

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Can you really call it a dying company when their annual revenue has tripled over the last seven years? This isn't the downfall of Adobe. This is the most successful they've ever been.

What jrockway describes is a common pattern; it's not necessarily the end of the company IME, but it's the end of the spirit of that company, whatever made them great is gone, they're riding on their laurels (relying on past 'wins').

Cadbury is a brand like this, as soon as they started smoothing corners on their chocolate bars to save a few percent volume and making the chocolate waxy they died. I expect under Kraft/Mondelez the brand is making more money than ever though.

I suspect there's a transition from R&D/development spending to marketing spending that marks the change.

This is how a milking stage of a product looks like, it's a last stage before death.

The milking stage can go on for a very, very long time.

Never underestimate it.

However in this case there is no death. Adobe is the de-facto for drawing to photo manipulation.

While there may be open-source alternatives however Adobe is kept alive via media & enterprise where there is no alternative.

edit: downvoted?

They are clearly losing market segment after market segment. Flash and Dreamweaver have lost the Internet market, Flash/Animate is no longer the clearly dominant software for 2d animation for media and television, XD is losing the web UX community, Photoshop is losing the hobby and semi-professional drawing community.

Adobe has enough momentum and moat that their demise will stretch over decades, and they could halt their fall at any point. Retaking market segments that are lost is hard, but regaining the trust of those about to leave is a lot easier. But if they keep course their eventual fall into irrelevance is inevitable.

> de-facto for drawing

I don't think that this is still true - most artists switched to CSP, Procreate, various other programs. There isn't really an industry standard any more.

> There isn't really an industry standard any more.

It is utilized heavily within Animation. Universal, Disney, are all heavy users of Adobe, unless that's changed in the past two years.

source: I had a gig for an medium sized animation studio, a large amount of artists all wanted and used adobe.

Many companies could triple their revenue by focusing on short term gains over long term profit.

The mix of less piracy, no used software, no discounts except for the education discount (which is also halved) is bound to lead to more revenue in the short term. But it also causes a lot of people to consider their alternatives.

Adobe isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Yes there are alternatives, Affinity, Pixelmator, etc, but all that's being taught in educational institutions is Adobe, and it's what the industry uses.

Private/small business users are a very small part of their business, but one that requires as many (if not more) support resources as large customers, so if anything they're probably happy to see them go elsewhere.

And no, i haven't used Adobe since they introduced subscriptions. I'll subscribe to media and cloud storage just fine, but not pay annual fees for micro software increments that 99% of the time doesn't add anything i need.

If they had something like Jetbrains where your subscription also gives a perpetual usage license for that specific version, then i could subscribe and upgrade when they actually added something i needed, and i'd likely reconsider.

Adobe isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

DEC, Commodore, Novell, SGI, Cray, Lotus, and Acorn would like you to explain how a computing companies last forever.

Adobe isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It may at some point,but not in the next 10-15 years. The last time I looked at their SEC fillings, they are doing pretty good. Of course how they achieve this 'pretty good' is a whole new question on its own. Adobe is very strongly rooted in the design industry, there are very few alternatives that are mainly used by smaller shops or individuals. I do agree that they are absolutely riding on their own wave right now due to lack of competition, but someday, someone will come along with a better offering.

Dont forget Sun. I remember a time when SPARC ruled the datacenter.....

The industry back then was a fraction of the size it is now. Studebaker and Pierce Arrow are gone too, but that doesn't mean Ford can vanish overnight.

It might be what part of the industry uses, but they’re steadily losing the rest. E.g. UX design has overwhelmingly moved from Photoshop to Sketch and Figma.

I have no love for Adobe, they have some scummy business practices, but:

1) There is an iPad version of Photoshop, and it's fine.

2) They are adding new features (at least to Photoshop), including some interesting and useful machine learning features like "select subject" and "enhance."

Adobe has expanded into digital marketing space. I think they have made several acquisitions in that area and now they are a digital marketing company.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-27/forget-ph...

I think digital media & document cloud still bring in the lion share of the revenue, and definitely of the profits (not even sure whether digital marketing is profitable yet, I think it wasn't when I left the company 2.5 years ago, but don't quote me on that, I didn't follow the financials very close)

What? I'm pretty sure I have Photoshop on my iPad...

I'm a paying subscriber to Adobe, but i'd stop if someone created a product that was 80% as good, but worked on Linux.

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