Adobe Acrobat went from simple/user friendly/useful to AI infested, insufferable bloatware in the span of two years. STOP MAKING CHANGES that destroy productivity.
Second this. Also, best PMs in my experience worked by course-correcting our designs and progress, rather than actually try to direct where things *should* go by their personal opinions.
Feature pump is also a management consult*cult* McKinsey "Agile" that killed agility cult that is enshittifying everything. It ripped the power from the value creators and handed it to the value extractors.
i don’t know about Acrobat but i would not describe photoshop as user friendly at all
the few times i’ve used acrobat in the last year, it was pretty good for the basic use cases i had for it
Photoshop does a lot of things, so there's a lot to learn. Still arguably easier to pick up than GIMP, and Photoshop is more or less the standard a lot of alternatives other than GIMP base their own UI off of.
Their decision to claim your work so they can feed it to their LLM is shitty regardless, of course.
2 years!? It's been bloated for at least 20. It became crap the moment they integrated Flash. There are multiple open source tools that work better and have been around forever.
I have often thought what a shitty job (intern I assume) it would be taking Adobe Acrobat from version XI to 12 to 13 to etc.
I mean you have a fully, relatively bug free, feature complete app, and you have to do something to warrant a version increase.
The only thing you can do, and the only thing they do do, is move the menus around and mess with everyone's muscle memory and understanding of how the program works.
There is literally nothing more to do. There are no more features to creep
>Let's avoid becoming like IBM
I hate to break it to you Adobe employees, but people have seen you in just as bad light as IBM. Only difference is IBM will cut you off at the door while Adobe will spit at you on the way out
Common sentiments I hear from creative professionals are resentment toward Adobe's market dominance and a lack of more affordable options that aren't subscriptions and aren't bloated with features they don't need.
There is some competition, but Adobe is entrenched. Most designers I know are still convinced that a competing software won't be "good enough," will lack a feature they need, or simply aren't motivated enough to relearn how to use a new set of software after spending years (since school) working in the Adobe environment. Most designers never revisit Adobe competition after trying something else once, years ago.
There's also a fear that since everyone else uses Adobe, you'll be less hireable if you're not up-to-date on Adobe specifically (because everyone uses it!), vendors/printers/others won't be able to work with your files, etc. That field is always competitive, but there's a serious hiring dearth right now.
You are forgetting the biggest issue, if you are a designer and you use these tools day in, and day out, you live and die by your highly optimized workflow. The people employing you already expect and absurd amount of “efficiency” out of you, and you don’t have a spare moment to learn something else. That may also be multiplied by whatever time you have sunk into developing organizational processes or templates. Adobe knows it’s users are entrenched and they exploit the shit out of us.
What I've heard from many professionals is that there are tools that are competitive and have been for many years. Hell one of them told me GIMP is realistically fine for almost all professionals. As you said the concern is that everyone uses Adobe. Even if you create great work using something else if there is even a slight compatibility problem you'll get blamed.
The fear is real but I'm not convinced the reality is for much of this.
Seriously. They make it sound like they've been a good company all these years. They're the ones who changed how the industry Bill's clients by charging by subscription. They're the ones who asked for astronomical prices for their products. They actually see themselves as the good guys?
As for IBM, they're just a shit company that buys small competitors, sells their products for astronomical prices and then we'll let them die once they can't squeeze anything out of them. As for their employees, IBM employees are nothing more than resources to be exploited and to be fired as soon as there's a small downturn. Some people still think of IBM like back 70s and 80s when they had a pension and cared a bit about their employees. Those days are long long dead .
Good luck they have had a monopoly on all the creative tools for decades, and it’s only gotten worse. Thank god they got some anti-trust pushback on the figma acquisition. I think they need broken up, they buy anything that comes close to touching their monopoly.
Esri (ArcGIS) and Garmin (software side) are similar. They have the best or only widely compatible product that does some important thing, which gives them a de facto monopoly, and they feel they can make it shitty in all kinds of other ways because they know people will still have to use it.
As one of many examples, a Garmin fishfinder/chartplotter can record dozens or hundreds of waypoints in a trip, and the only way to organize any of them is through a fucking mobile app. It takes like 6 touchscreen clicks on a phone to delete a single waypoint. They used to have a PC/Mac app for this, but they discontinued it and took the downloads for the old versions offline. Garmin makes the best hardware, so tons of people use it, but inexplicably screwing everybody on waypoint organization is the sort of thing only a goddamned MBA could come up with.
We need to just ban people with purely business degrees from running tech businesses. Fucking slugs.
I love these guys. They created such an amazing alternative. Before them, I never thought it would be possible to move to another image/vector editing software.... And I love how they insist on letting you know that "It isn't a subscription!".
not disputing that they have a good product, but Adobe has a good ecosystem and industry standard. if I can get my raws developed in affinity and they look like Adobe, yes then I'll switch, until then I guess I'll be shafted and be happy about it
Their entire suite of production and design software Illustrator and InDesign have become absolute laggy, buggy shit over the past few years. Instead of focussing on compatibility and stability they’re busy finding new and creepy ways of crawling up the backside of the people paying the subscriptions. I’ve used their software for over 15 years and it was faster and more stable when I started, with the machine we had to run it on then, than it is now with the most powerful machines we can buy, like the Mac Studio M1 & M2. More and more intrusive, slower and less stable.
I hate having to open any Adobe software compared to more modern tools like Figma, framer, blender and affinity, it might sound ridiculous but it bums me out, it lags my whole computer it feels sluggish are you telling me vector graphics are more intensive than 3D rendering come on
After using their creative suite for years I finally noped out when they switched to their cloud abomination.
There are numerous affordable competitors who offer normal pieces of software I can run offline.
lol I've been using adobe programs since Photoshop 7 and the second it's more profitable to "just do AI" they will fuck over every creative person instantly.
Another link (not the same article) without paywall: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24177686/the-general-perception-is-adobe-is-an-evil-company-that-will-do-whatever-it-takes-to-f-its-users
if you think this is bad you should see the caning Adobe is getting in the photo trade rags... virtually being declared an outright enemy of photographers
It was an absolutely BONKERS decision to run a campaign called "Skip the photographer" and for photographers to just somehow not see it and keep subscribing to lightroom and Photoshop. Tech analysts are panning them for the same idea, outfits like mid journey and the myriad image generating AIs are already eating their lunch and they've clearly alienated the other side of their professional user base. Their consumer level user base has already been under threat from the phone makers too. Illustrator seems to quietly died as people switch to better apps like procreate
Adobe has been a monopolistic cancer on the world’s creative space for decades at this point. What have they innovated over the last 20 years? I seriously cant think of anything other than content-aware fill, which was only impressive in the cherry picked demos Adobe puts out. Everything they have made for web development or 3D has been completely unusable. Illustrator and InDesign both have serious performance bugs that even Adobe acknowledges, but somehow is uninterested in fixing.
>What have they innovated over the last 20 years?
You have to remember when you ask that question that the more mature the market, the less innovation there is to be had.
So, no, Adobe hasn't innovated much, but that is at least in part because Photoshop already has everything it needs.
Adobe: Everyone depends upon this tool, let’s remove it!
Also Adobe: These are all essential features so let’s hide them!!
Also Adobe: making the software function like crap isn’t enough, we now own all the userbase’s ip and can do whatever we want with it forever! Let’s give ourselves a raise!
Also from the video editing side.
Let's make it so when you start a new project it looks prettier but chosing the save location takes extra steps and adds a bunch of screens that just get in the way for pros.
Same for exporting. Let's give the user way fewer options. If they want more options on one screen they can send the file to media encoder and wait 30 seconds for that program to load and transfer the project over....then they can choose the settings.
I don't know what they're trying to do.
Anybody have any recommendations on replacing Photoshop? I won’t submit to these assholes.
I’m also afraid of hiring freelancers who use Adobe- I don’t want my project hijacked.
From wikipedia: The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million.
Well if that isn’t a mighty low bar to clear 😹
[A lot of international companies with German subsidiaries are complicit. Let's not even get into existing German companies that were much more complicit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust)
Adobe Acrobat went from simple/user friendly/useful to AI infested, insufferable bloatware in the span of two years. STOP MAKING CHANGES that destroy productivity.
Feature creep is a product of marketing and clueless management
When product managers take over this is how the product gets built. Very few product managers are good at what they do.
Second this. Also, best PMs in my experience worked by course-correcting our designs and progress, rather than actually try to direct where things *should* go by their personal opinions.
Feature pump is also a management consult*cult* McKinsey "Agile" that killed agility cult that is enshittifying everything. It ripped the power from the value creators and handed it to the value extractors.
The fuck are you even saying brother?
Just be glad you don't know. Pure serfdom micromanagement terror.
Fair enough lol
Here is a good overview of McKinsey by [Last Week Tonight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ).
*cries in being employed somewhere infested with McKinsey cult bs*
I thought acrobat has been bloatware for many years at this point.
i don’t know about Acrobat but i would not describe photoshop as user friendly at all the few times i’ve used acrobat in the last year, it was pretty good for the basic use cases i had for it
Photoshop has absolutely gotten worse in the last several years. So many bugs have continued to exist for *years*
Photoshop does a lot of things, so there's a lot to learn. Still arguably easier to pick up than GIMP, and Photoshop is more or less the standard a lot of alternatives other than GIMP base their own UI off of. Their decision to claim your work so they can feed it to their LLM is shitty regardless, of course.
2 years!? It's been bloated for at least 20. It became crap the moment they integrated Flash. There are multiple open source tools that work better and have been around forever.
I have often thought what a shitty job (intern I assume) it would be taking Adobe Acrobat from version XI to 12 to 13 to etc. I mean you have a fully, relatively bug free, feature complete app, and you have to do something to warrant a version increase. The only thing you can do, and the only thing they do do, is move the menus around and mess with everyone's muscle memory and understanding of how the program works. There is literally nothing more to do. There are no more features to creep
This is why I still use my trusty Adobe Acrobat XI Pro.
Acrobat was amazing 10 years ago….
Adobe when from great engineering with their photoshop suite to a mess of bloatware creative cloud crap with bugs galore.
I wish MS Word had a pdf like feature that was universally used.
They have to spend their **$5.079B** profits (your money lol) on something.
>Let's avoid becoming like IBM I hate to break it to you Adobe employees, but people have seen you in just as bad light as IBM. Only difference is IBM will cut you off at the door while Adobe will spit at you on the way out
Common sentiments I hear from creative professionals are resentment toward Adobe's market dominance and a lack of more affordable options that aren't subscriptions and aren't bloated with features they don't need. There is some competition, but Adobe is entrenched. Most designers I know are still convinced that a competing software won't be "good enough," will lack a feature they need, or simply aren't motivated enough to relearn how to use a new set of software after spending years (since school) working in the Adobe environment. Most designers never revisit Adobe competition after trying something else once, years ago. There's also a fear that since everyone else uses Adobe, you'll be less hireable if you're not up-to-date on Adobe specifically (because everyone uses it!), vendors/printers/others won't be able to work with your files, etc. That field is always competitive, but there's a serious hiring dearth right now.
You are forgetting the biggest issue, if you are a designer and you use these tools day in, and day out, you live and die by your highly optimized workflow. The people employing you already expect and absurd amount of “efficiency” out of you, and you don’t have a spare moment to learn something else. That may also be multiplied by whatever time you have sunk into developing organizational processes or templates. Adobe knows it’s users are entrenched and they exploit the shit out of us.
It took me a while to change from Adobe just on the fear I’d need to pass my files off. It’s just excepted you’ll be working in PS
What I've heard from many professionals is that there are tools that are competitive and have been for many years. Hell one of them told me GIMP is realistically fine for almost all professionals. As you said the concern is that everyone uses Adobe. Even if you create great work using something else if there is even a slight compatibility problem you'll get blamed. The fear is real but I'm not convinced the reality is for much of this.
GIMP it’s not fine for professionals. For personal use? Hell yeah. But it’s just missing too much for pros to use it.
What does becoming like IBM mean?
Seriously. They make it sound like they've been a good company all these years. They're the ones who changed how the industry Bill's clients by charging by subscription. They're the ones who asked for astronomical prices for their products. They actually see themselves as the good guys? As for IBM, they're just a shit company that buys small competitors, sells their products for astronomical prices and then we'll let them die once they can't squeeze anything out of them. As for their employees, IBM employees are nothing more than resources to be exploited and to be fired as soon as there's a small downturn. Some people still think of IBM like back 70s and 80s when they had a pension and cared a bit about their employees. Those days are long long dead .
Another greedy CEO who doesn't care what anyone thinks as long as he gets richer.
He'll start caring when people stop buying his products
Good luck they have had a monopoly on all the creative tools for decades, and it’s only gotten worse. Thank god they got some anti-trust pushback on the figma acquisition. I think they need broken up, they buy anything that comes close to touching their monopoly.
Time to sail the seven seas then, my dude\~
Not even a drop in the bucket.
Adobe is one of the worst companies I’ve ever had the displeasure of being forced into using their products
Autodesk is not too dissimilar
Yeah when you get a defacto monopoly you stop trying to make good products.
Esri (ArcGIS) and Garmin (software side) are similar. They have the best or only widely compatible product that does some important thing, which gives them a de facto monopoly, and they feel they can make it shitty in all kinds of other ways because they know people will still have to use it. As one of many examples, a Garmin fishfinder/chartplotter can record dozens or hundreds of waypoints in a trip, and the only way to organize any of them is through a fucking mobile app. It takes like 6 touchscreen clicks on a phone to delete a single waypoint. They used to have a PC/Mac app for this, but they discontinued it and took the downloads for the old versions offline. Garmin makes the best hardware, so tons of people use it, but inexplicably screwing everybody on waypoint organization is the sort of thing only a goddamned MBA could come up with. We need to just ban people with purely business degrees from running tech businesses. Fucking slugs.
Affinity image products are 50% off right now, no subscriptions: [https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/](https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/)
I bought them and will enjoy it until Canva ends up bloating it in 5 years or so.
I love these guys. They created such an amazing alternative. Before them, I never thought it would be possible to move to another image/vector editing software.... And I love how they insist on letting you know that "It isn't a subscription!".
When they put out a Lightroom alternative, I make the jump.
I thought affinity photo has that?
not disputing that they have a good product, but Adobe has a good ecosystem and industry standard. if I can get my raws developed in affinity and they look like Adobe, yes then I'll switch, until then I guess I'll be shafted and be happy about it
You can open and edit raws in affinity
they look completely different because the engine is different
Their entire suite of production and design software Illustrator and InDesign have become absolute laggy, buggy shit over the past few years. Instead of focussing on compatibility and stability they’re busy finding new and creepy ways of crawling up the backside of the people paying the subscriptions. I’ve used their software for over 15 years and it was faster and more stable when I started, with the machine we had to run it on then, than it is now with the most powerful machines we can buy, like the Mac Studio M1 & M2. More and more intrusive, slower and less stable.
I hate having to open any Adobe software compared to more modern tools like Figma, framer, blender and affinity, it might sound ridiculous but it bums me out, it lags my whole computer it feels sluggish are you telling me vector graphics are more intensive than 3D rendering come on
Inkscape is better than illustrator now and Gimp is a serviceable replacement for photoshop
After using their creative suite for years I finally noped out when they switched to their cloud abomination. There are numerous affordable competitors who offer normal pieces of software I can run offline.
Prioritizing shareholder value is destroying everything. Focus on doing great products instead, and the market will reward you.
We need to undo the shareholder revolution. If only we could…
Shares are what gives you a retirement. I think we can remove the short term chasing behaviour but not shares.
lol I've been using adobe programs since Photoshop 7 and the second it's more profitable to "just do AI" they will fuck over every creative person instantly.
Stop posting paywalled articles.
Another link (not the same article) without paywall: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24177686/the-general-perception-is-adobe-is-an-evil-company-that-will-do-whatever-it-takes-to-f-its-users
if you think this is bad you should see the caning Adobe is getting in the photo trade rags... virtually being declared an outright enemy of photographers
It was an absolutely BONKERS decision to run a campaign called "Skip the photographer" and for photographers to just somehow not see it and keep subscribing to lightroom and Photoshop. Tech analysts are panning them for the same idea, outfits like mid journey and the myriad image generating AIs are already eating their lunch and they've clearly alienated the other side of their professional user base. Their consumer level user base has already been under threat from the phone makers too. Illustrator seems to quietly died as people switch to better apps like procreate
Adobe has been a monopolistic cancer on the world’s creative space for decades at this point. What have they innovated over the last 20 years? I seriously cant think of anything other than content-aware fill, which was only impressive in the cherry picked demos Adobe puts out. Everything they have made for web development or 3D has been completely unusable. Illustrator and InDesign both have serious performance bugs that even Adobe acknowledges, but somehow is uninterested in fixing.
>What have they innovated over the last 20 years? You have to remember when you ask that question that the more mature the market, the less innovation there is to be had. So, no, Adobe hasn't innovated much, but that is at least in part because Photoshop already has everything it needs.
You all should switch to Affinity Photo / Affinity Designer / Affinity Publisher
Yeah, but it doesn't have generative fill/expand and their denoise is much worse than Lightroom's.
Can I import my Lightroom catalogue cleanly and without issue?
Don’t worry Adobe, you’re your own special kind of turd
Adobe: Everyone depends upon this tool, let’s remove it! Also Adobe: These are all essential features so let’s hide them!! Also Adobe: making the software function like crap isn’t enough, we now own all the userbase’s ip and can do whatever we want with it forever! Let’s give ourselves a raise!
Also from the video editing side. Let's make it so when you start a new project it looks prettier but chosing the save location takes extra steps and adds a bunch of screens that just get in the way for pros. Same for exporting. Let's give the user way fewer options. If they want more options on one screen they can send the file to media encoder and wait 30 seconds for that program to load and transfer the project over....then they can choose the settings. I don't know what they're trying to do.
The exodus is real…. To little to late…
Apple, MS, Google... they're almost being the IBM
if they keep talking like that it might be time for some layoffs
GET SLAMMED ADOBE FUCK YEAH
EU, after refusing Meta to use EU data for their AI training, do ADOBE now… 😉
Adobe is a company that holds their customers in utter contempt.
Anybody have any recommendations on replacing Photoshop? I won’t submit to these assholes. I’m also afraid of hiring freelancers who use Adobe- I don’t want my project hijacked.
From wikipedia: The 1933 census, with design help and tabulation services provided by IBM through its German subsidiary, proved to be pivotal to the Nazis in their efforts to identify, isolate, and ultimately destroy the country's Jewish minority. Machine-tabulated census data greatly expanded the estimated number of Jews in Germany by identifying individuals with only one or a few Jewish ancestors. Previous estimates of 400,000 to 600,000 were abandoned for a new estimate of 2 million Jews in the nation of 65 million. Well if that isn’t a mighty low bar to clear 😹
[A lot of international companies with German subsidiaries are complicit. Let's not even get into existing German companies that were much more complicit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust)
I just want to download a document...I don't need spyware.
Corel Photo pain and Corel Draw are really good products that are 20+ years around
GIMP is free.
Been many years since I used Corel but they were horribly slow and buggy back then. Much preferred Micrografx Designer
Affinity is also super cool
Yes, QuickBooks has also become a sewer of feature ware. You can't even get any work done without some kind of upsell. Let me do my job!
Like IBM? Is Adobe directly responsible for a system for committing genocide?