Thank you Adobe!

We’ve had a great journey together but it’s time to say goodbye!… Although… It’s your fault and let me explain why…

Ever since I’ve started working professionally on the creative industry more than 10 years ago, Adobe software has been the standard by which every designer measured their software skills. For the most part this still holds true nowadays, but the tides are changing rapidly it and will probably be too overwhelming for Adobe to handle.

Nimbleness

Most Adobe products are now authentic dinosaurs (measured in tech-years). The first commercial release of Photoshop was in March, 1989! This effectively makes it one of the oldest softwares still being actively used! While age in most cases means experience, in the software world also means a big baggage of legacy code, which in turn, usually results in a pile of outdated features and bugs.

Let’s face it, Adobe can’t simply redesign Photoshop (or any of their other major products) from the ground-up and hope that their several million users love the new version. We all know how people react to change, and everybody saw what happened when Adobe replaced FreeHand with Illustrator — there are still people today swearing FreeHand is/was better than Illustrator!

This lack of innovation that Adobe is tied to, is exactly what the other software companies have to their favour. They can afford to bring new, bold and exciting features pretty much on every release. Since the typical users of these softwares are more likely to embrace change, it’s a win-win situation.

Price

I  won’t  even talk about the prices Adobe practices outside United States, but their change to a subscription based service surely doesn’t fit everyone as they seem to think.

Basically, for $600 you get all their products for one year, after that you have to keep paying the monthly fee or you lose all the access to their software. There are other plans too, but in all honesty they are ridiculous, especially if you just intend to use 2 or 3 of their products.

While I can understand how this works best for Adobe, for a lot of users it doesn’t. When for $55 you can buy both Pixelmator and iDraw, and effectively own them for the rest of your life, it makes it REALLY hard to justify the $480 Adobe charges for one year of Photoshop and Illustrator.

What now?

As you’ve probably guessed by now, my Adobe subscription ended a couple of weeks ago and yes, I’m not renewing it. After several trials and tests I’ve found incredibly powerful and capable replacements for the two Adobe products I used the most.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone should do the same or even that these alternatives fit everyone and every need. However, in my specific case, and I think in many others too, they perfectly cover all my use cases, with a lot of room to grow, while at the same time saving me quite a few bucks.

While I’m not a professional artist or designer, my skills lie elsewhere, doing my personal projects as an one-man team, forces me to constantly re-evaluate my methodology. Since I believe Adobe no longer gives a competitive edge, we’re going our separate ways.

Would love to hear your opinion on this subject so feel free to comment here or follow me on Twitter for further discussion!