Cloud atlas: Oh dear. Now Adobe has mapped out a slowdown Adobe, maker of pricey software for artsy types, is still growing like a weed but last night joined a list of tech titans to forecast a slowdown. Revenue for Q1 ended 1 March (PDF) grew 26 per cent year-on-year to $2.6bn, beating guidance of $2.54bn: subscriptions were up 29 per cent to $2.3bn; product revenue dipped 0.6 per …
I wonder how much of this relates to customers going "damn, that's getting expensive, lets do without it", rather than the previous iterations where people purchased software and used it as necessary.
The cloud models are often based on the view that it "only costs you £x per day", which is great if you live in that software, but useless when you use it once a week or once a month, then the value proposition looks very different.
Which is a kind of a pity, because it's what I would consider one of the core software skills. The sort a lot of people acquire through infrequent use as a step to another goal. They've priced themselves out of my game - no-one is going to pay that when they don't use it that month... but the hassle of starting and stopping monthly subscriptions in a large corporate environment *IF* you haven't been forced to pay up for the whole year already... with a notional admin cost of £50 a time... not going to happen.
Sorry, Adobe, it might work for some, but it most definitely doesn't work for all, even if you insist it does. Now, it *might* work if you had billing tied into a NLM like you used to do donkey's years ago.
I wonder how many companies have just abandoned doing graphic design in-house and instead ship the work to outsourcing shops. Then you also have the fact that consumer photo and video products have become good enough for most of the purposes that Photoshop and the like were originally used for (the photo and video editors that are shipping with OSes tend to be more than good enough for internal graphics. MS Office and LibreOffice are capable of producing quality PDFs; camera technology has removed most of the use cases for products like Lightroom; and so on).
Plus, the advertising industry has moved away from well-polished stuff that looks like a studio spent months working on it and moved towards stuff that looks like some trendy Instagram personality threw together in a few minutes with a few taps on their phone.
Ahh... a kindred spirit. I'm not sure if you've had a chance to take a look at the DVD release of Finding Dory at some point [1], but the first things I noted were:
1.) Wow! I haven't seen something new that is this intuitive, pleasing on the eye, and easy to read for a decade or more. (Yes, flat monochrome dark icons on a dark background with dark text in a trendy font, I'm looking squarely at you. Ditto for light text on white background with monochrome light grey icons.)
2.) Why aren't all DVDs like this?
3.) You know, the overall design reminds me of Windows 2000/XP. With some of the advertising from the '60s thrown in.
4.) Oh, right, there used to be actual design standards. From people that made a living at this and thought about how to convey information in a useful but still eye catching manner.
5.) Where did Disney dig up this kind of UX person in today's day and age? They still exist?
Icon 'cause it's about the opposite of your Instagram star.
[1] Since Disney appears to have released not only the interface I'm referring to, but another one that's every bit the obnoxious hard-to-use typical DVD experience, here's a direct link to some screenshots:
http://dvdmoviemenus.com/dvd/?mid=4/003096
Just seeing a readable font in reversal isn't all that common any more.
If you are photographing on any sort of serious level you need a way of organising your work.
Lightroom does that (with keywords and other metadata) and supports a workflow with RAW conversation and editing
Capture One does a similar job, and there may be more options. IPhoto is quite lacking compared.
The problem with the subscription model is as mentioned for the sw you use rarely. I dropped Photoshop for Affinity photo for that reason and have not looked back.
So are a lot of my clients! Probably the most used Adobe products in graphics are Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. As soon as Affinity gets Publisher out of Beta to join Photos and Designer as modern replacements for the poorly coded, tired, buggy and overpriced Adobe stuff, you'll hear a big whoop all around EC1.
It's going to come back to bite them.
Adobe got greedy, relying on people self-teaching with pirate copies of their products; because a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop for £0 represents a bigger saving than a legitimate copy of something cheaper. Someone who just uses Photoshop for their holiday snaps probably was never going to buy it anyway; but if they get a job editing photographs, there is a chance to sell their new employer the software they already know how to use.
Now they have tightened up and slowed the leakage of pirate copies, people are just using other things instead (including Open Source) -- and they are taking what they know with them when they get jobs, so employers are buying from Adobe's competitors, or even using Open Source.
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