C L O U D
A peculiar way to spell whim.
If COVID-19 had showed up years before Adobe found the cloud and forced customers into an online subscription model, fortunes at the reassuringly expensive maker of software for creative types might have been very different right about now. As it was, Adobe last night rolled out revenues of $3.13bn [PDF], up 14 per cent year- …
Evidently as soon as enough Adobe users switched to Adobe subscriptions or to something else the curve will flatten - maybe this is just a sign it has begun, most users on a subscription won't cancel it because of the lockdown (maybe more if Adobe Cloud stop working more often...), and while many photographers had a hard time (but many took the time to work on old images) - other creatives were probably less.
During this or any lockdown you might realize you've been heavily focused on 1 thing and have finally realized other interests exist. In those instances, how many photographers will drift away and how many new photographers will be born? I'm guessing but, I think there will be a smaller number of new photographers compared to the ones drifting away, especially as "professional" photography is becoming more and more of "hey, buy this from that kid who took this shot on his phone".
Adobe doesn't sell camera or lenses - even if you take photographs with a phone you'll need to process them somehow - and Adobe has been busy porting Lightroom and Photoshop to mobes and tablets as well. Still photographers are just a slice of Adobe's Creative Cloud product users.
I've heard anyway many photographers taking this time to go through the images taken in the previous years and making the edits they never did for lack of time.
And the lockdown impacted the sales of new phones as well.