Adobe is Cooked
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, unfortunately hollowed out by short-termism. There are incredible people there: creatives, engineers, among others. I believe part of the downfall is, inevitably, the fate of growing too big for too long and 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, which result in an overall slow pace of innovation and, sometimes, bad decisions.
There must be some of that. For sure. The point where I don’t think it alone explains the whole picture is that Adobe had the resources, the talent, and the runway to manage that transition. They chose not to.
Remember Creative Cloud? Of course you do. We all do. It’s still with us.
Who likes it?
No one.
People get hit with cancellation fees for trying to leave. What about that?
What about the insane pricing scheme they charge for software you don’t even own? Some things, yes, make sense as a subscription. This one? Worth noting that Adobe did sell their software outright before Creative Cloud.
What about features? Because, I mean, that was part of the promise. Some sort of interesting gaslighting, I would say, because you get this dynamic where they were industry leaders with no competition, they could ship new major versions of their software every year, and if that happened, people would buy their software. Why did they need to justify moving to a subscription model? Makes you wonder…
And it’s not like there were greater cloud services back then that could justify that. 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, sort of forcefully, so users won’t even think of escaping. Only then can you milk them, comfortably.
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 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. At times, there is baggage, which inevitably happens in software originally created in a different era. This is called technical debt. I’m mainly a software engineer. We usually develop a pretty good intuition when we use things that have been dragging along old patterns, with patches on top to keep things afloat. Thing is, at some point, it is doomed to fail. Building new features becomes a whack-a-mole game. Code maintainers and the people working on it don’t particularly feel motivated.
Furthermore, the people who initially coded parts of the codebase will move to other companies, retire, and new people will come in. These new people will have to study what has been done previously, which is a dreadful task. 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 money and brand reputation involved, and your job security, you name it), there’s too much risk in changing some of these gears. You just don’t touch it. Managers skip it.
Performance issues, bugs, useful features that creatives had been requesting for years, only to work around them indefinitely because Adobe never bothered to respond. Things that might not be that complicated if they put in the work and the care. Can this be profitable in the short term? No, I don’t think so. But 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!
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, an Adobe advertisement popped up in my Instagram feed. It was an AI “dog influencer” doing a demo of Photoshop’s AI image infill feature to erase a fence in a photo, coupled with an AI image upscale inside Photoshop to compensate for the loss of detail, distorting the original image even more than it already was.
You see how out of touch they are? It was dystopian. Cringe at best. Super cringe. It was painful to watch. It made me a little sad to find some bright creatives I follow and whose work I admire had liked it. Or maybe they liked a different Adobe ad, because Instagram seems to chain every like from different posts as long as they belong to the same ad campaign. I want to believe that was the reason.
We can say hundreds of things about the ad. There’s the ultimate sad thing it revealed, though: technically speaking, they could have selected only the fence and AI in-filled only that. What was behind it would have been preserved much better. This is something Photoshop is capable of. But the very same company that owns that software, that develops it, that’s pouring thousands of dollars into AI dog influencers with AI dialogs trying to keep up with the status quo on social media, doesn’t know what their own software is even capable of.
Wake up and smell the ashes.
For the first time we don’t just have alternatives. We have better software.