This article captures my feelings 100%. Enough good will has been burned that I'm willing to suffer worse products or higher prices from others than to deal with Adobe again. But you don't have to put up with worse, you actually can have a lot better than Adobe products! This article doesn't mention the competition but Da Vinci Resolve is taking over the next generation of users right now.
Double digit growth in YoY revenue for past ten years, YoY net income stable growth as well, with 28% last year alone. I wish I was cooked like that. Adobe's going nowhere soon, their stock will find grounding soon enough. Adobe always swims, like Autodesk.
I thought Adobe was boned 15 years ago (2011) when they debuted Creative Cloud and it was universally despised while their stranglehold on PDF manipulation was already well on its way out, yet here they are still alive and kicking. I chalk it up to the inertia of big dumb orgs that would rather keep paying for a piece of crap they're familiar with than risk trying something new.
A few years ago we had issues deleting some PDF files because they were in use, well, it turns out Creative Cloud agent decided to upload confidential PDF files to cloud for no particular reason, a service you cannot even turn off.
if you're a software engineer reading this, or any other similar piece about Adobe or Autodesk, you should come away with the understanding that this is the future your profession is being herded into.
I struggle to call the users of Maya/Photoshop/etc anything other than "disenfranchised". The way that these companies treat their clients is appalling and you will very soon get to enjoy the same.
Genuinely curious, what does that mean? Is the PDF standard now open and free, or does Adobe wield any power? Does it own trademarks (for pdf itself, not Acrobat Reader or sth like that)?
In theory, that means that anybody can create a fully compatible editor/reader, and if Adobe tries to change theirs it will be them that are incompatible.
In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.
It's been open and free on Adobe's website for 20+ years, aside from proprietary extensions like XFA. It's the ISO standards that until recently required payment (as that's how ISO generally works).
I struggle to call the users of Maya/Photoshop/etc anything other than "disenfranchised". The way that these companies treat their clients is appalling and you will very soon get to enjoy the same.
In practice, I don't know why people are talking about PDF. In any recent time, I have only seen people using Adobe readers by accident and haven't heard about anybody using their editor for any reason. I know of some people that buy their editors, just not any that use it.
Acrobat is an awful piece of software.