What do you get when you spend the last decade and a half exploiting the very same people you were supposed to empower?
Adobe is a huge company. No doubt there is a surplus of great engineers and creatives there. It is unfortunately hollowed out by short-termism.
I believe part of the downfall is, inevitably, the fate of growing too big for too long. They are facing fierce competition from newer, smaller players who can harness the power of new technologies without the overhead of maintaining old systems, a large staff, and dreadful bureaucratic processes. This all results in an overall slow pace of innovation and, sometimes, challenging timing to make proper technical decisions.
There must be some of that. For sure. We’re talking about Adobe, though. They sure had the resources, the talent, and the runway to manage that transition. They just chose not to. Priorities were different.
Remember Creative Cloud? Of course you do. We all do. It’s still with us.
Who likes it? No one.
One of the most insulting moves it enabled them to do is to hit people who dared to cancel their subscription with surprising, insane fees for trying to leave. What about that? Could you respect a company that treats their users like that? Most of them have supported and cheered them on for decades. It’s gotten to the point where, if you pirated their software, you would have a better experience.
They’ve been recently fined for this. $150 million dollars. They’ve been using these despicable tactics for years. The point is, if the Department of Justice hadn’t taken action, they would still be getting away with it. The only reason for Adobe to settle is because there was no way out. Their PR statement is a complete mockery to the people.
Quoting:
”[…] Our subscription model was designed to accelerate innovation while making our technology more accessible […]”
Yeah! Right?
I’m drowning in gaslight here. Previous to the subscription model, they would ship major versions of their software every year. Software you can purchase, and use it indefinitely. They get incentives for actually fixing bugs and ship new features, as major versions of software would be purchased if it was worth it. At some point they found themselves as industry leaders.
Being a digital creative meant using Adobe software. This combination of factors made them realize that maybe, just maybe… they could optimize the money flow further. Previously, they were competing with themselves, year by year, to produce a better version of what they shipped last year. Only against them, as external competition wasn’t a threat, really.
So, they found it. They came up with the subscription model. It ended the last financial incentive to ship better software. They could cut down the cost of innovation, while charging customers more for the same. Win-win.
And it’s not like there were greater cloud services back then that could use as proper justification for what they’ve done. Even to this day, people still opt for local-first. It is performant, it is cheaper. Cloud can solve some inconveniences, but sometimes it creates more problems than it supposedly solves. Professional work has usually been characterized by the ability to integrate different pieces of software from different makers together. That dynamic, as a consequence, maintained a degree of sanity and reality checks upon companies to not get greedy and be tempted to build a walled garden. Adobe decided to build one regardless.
That is the kind of monopolistic, predatory customer disrespect that comes from people at the top, and by the time they realize the damage it has created long-term, it is already too late. Or maybe it’s not. After all, maybe that’s what they wanted: to squeeze people’s wallets dry, then take off. Classic publicly traded company behavior, serving only the interests of shareholders who can’t speak any language other than profit.
I’ve been waiting for so long to be able to write this. Not because I didn’t want to. In fact, I’ve been saying the above for quite some time. It’s just that we didn’t have any alternatives. The major issue was software. It has always been. Adobe is software (do they know that?). For Premiere, you might say there have been competing applications all along, more or less. Same goes for Illustrator. But Photoshop? It became such a behemoth that it turned into a verb. To “photoshop” something, like when someone says “google that, please.”
Photoshop is the software I’ve been working with for 15 years at this point. It has been an important tool for my career. I still feel a ton of appreciation for it. The photos and montages I shipped to clients. The assets we offer at martyr— have been built with and for it. The dumb memes and inside jokes that accounted for hours of laughter amongst friends and peers.
As good as it is, it is far from perfect. You will notice parts of the app that are not quite keeping up with modern times and requirements. It inevitably happens in software originally created in a different era. This is called technical debt. I’m mainly a software engineer. We would develop a pretty good intuition when there is a piece of software that have been dragging along old patterns, with patches on top to keep things afloat.
Software that’s been kept alive with rough patches are doomed to fail at some point. Building new features becomes a whack-a-mole game. Code maintainers and the people working on it don’t particularly feel motivated. Risk increases, and you become even more conservative.
Furthermore, the devs who initially coded parts of the app will naturally cease to maintain their stuff because they could’ve moved to other companies, retired, you get it. New people will take their part. They will have to study what was done previously, which is quite the task on its own. Sometimes you don’t end up understanding what the previous engineers did, and given the software needs to be working globally for millions of people, there’s too much risk in changing some of these gears. I believe LLMs can help with it to some extent but the core mechanics are still there: too much money and brand reputation involved, your job security, etc. So, you don’t touch it. Nobody does. But even if you want to, managers will tell you to skip it and focus on something else.
Performance issues, bugs, useful features that creatives had been requesting for years, only to work around them indefinitely because Adobe never bothered to ship. Things that might not be that complicated if they put in the work and the care. And even if some of those changes are genuinely complex to pull off, it’s still doable given time and effort. They’ve got the talent pool already. Can this be profitable in the short term? No, I don’t think so. However, stack enough of them and, long term, users will notice. And you get to stay in the game while building something people actually love.
But hey, I’m an investor! I want money now!! Look, everybody else is talking about this AI thing. I don’t know, do something with it, as soon as you can!!!! That will get us the big bucks yeeeee!!1!
Oh yes.
The ultimate money milking scapegoat.
Sorry, sorry. I mean, our beloved saviour, AI of course!
Suddenly, Adobe software, after years of thin updates wrapped in this Creative Cloud with questionable intentions, saw an explosion of AI features all over the place. So they were able to do something. For the creatives, though? For the professionals who had been trusting them for decades? For whom was this set of hype features?
Three days ago, this Adobe advertisement popped up in my Instagram feed. It was an AI “dog influencer” (damn) with a fake AI voice, doing a demo of Photoshop’s AI image infill feature to erase a fence in a AI photo of a raccoon. It erased the fence at the cost of lower resolution and shifting the look and feel of the entire image a bit. To make up for the loss of resolution, the video goes on and guides you through an AI image upscale option Photoshop has, which, again, will inevitably shift the creative vision of the image. It compounds.
Honestly, it only needed the AI dog to make it unbearable to watch. Dystopian vibes. Cringe at best. Super cringe.
We can say hundreds of things about the ad. Technically, they could have selected only the fence and used AI in-fill just for that. The raccoon and its environment would have been preserved much better. Photoshop can already do this. The effort is minimal.
Yet, the same company behind Photoshop, pouring thousands into AI dog influencers and synthetic dialogue to keep up with social media, doesn’t seem to understand what its own software is capable of.
Wake up and smell the ashes.
For the first time we don’t just have alternatives.
We have better software.