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Comment by hrktb | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure to understand your point. Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?

There are alternatives to each of the Adobe products, self hosted and available offline. People going the Creative Cloud route for their daily job are in a situation where the alternative costed too much or doesn't allow them to do their job in a sufficient way, so there was no real viable options from the start.

The problem is not really to trust Adobe or not. Adobe doesnt have any track record of great online services, I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.

I think this whole discussion would have taken a different turn if it wasn't Adobe but Amazon AWS or Google. When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line. Why is it so different for Adobe ?

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> I don't think they have an image of high quality software either, they do some amazing things and bring killer features, but I harldy heard anyone being loyal to Adobe itself.

Having worked with designers I'm going to disagree. For most designers Photoshop or Illustrator are the only tools they'll even consider using because they're so much more powerful than the competition. That's changing a little with things like Pixelmator, but even then people have to learn a new workflow after decades of using Photoshop.

I agree with the power of Photoshop or Illustrator. But do you consider it highly well designed, solid and polished software ?

I am not a Photoshop user so my image is from hearsay, feel free to state your opinion. But what I heard was it's bloated, doesn't fully integrate/take advantage of the OS and hardware potential, crashes every once in a while and you'll have nothing to do about it.

To make a parrallel with coding tools, I feel it's on the same league as Eclipse. It's the very obvious choice for some application stacks, has tons of feature and it's plenty powerful. But I don't think most people love working with it (at least I don't), there's just no good enough alternative for the thing they want to do.

Photoshop and Illustrator are not quality software in many ways, but for professional designers they contain features that competitors do not. And a bigger issue locking people in is that if you are collaborating with anyone, everyone has to use the same thing. Competitors to Illustrator are generally not fully compatible and can't perfectly open an Illustrator file.

> Does it boil down to "single point of failure are bad"?

In the sense that "trust in a single entity as a single point of failure" - sure. Adobe can cut you off for any number of reasons, an outage being just one.

> When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line .

One of those comments might have been mine. Still, I'm not saying that you should self-host, I'm saying you should use solutions that you could realistically self-host should the need arise.

So if you use s3 for your (non-web-related) data, maybe have riak-cs ready to go as a backup (it's a bit of a contrived example, because you probably either need a "cloud fs" of some sort, or mercurial/git or whatnot, not "s3" to be able to keep working).

I absolutely think one should have an alternative ready if one is heavily based on amazon -- at least have the option to spin up a minimal set of equivalent services as an openstack/nebula solution.

There are many reasons why you might get into trouble with any one provider, not just that their infrastructure goes down. If they hold all your data (and your backups) -- you pretty much have no leverage at all.

For professionals working in design there Is no real alternative to Photoshop.

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