
Adobe Acquires Photo-Editing Platform Aviary - zabalmendi
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/22/adobe-acquires-aviary/
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liquidise
Surprising negativity in here, an observation to consider: HN tends to be
biased regarding acquisitions. Some companies, like Google or Apple, are
praised for sage decisions and invaluable acqui-hires. Others, like Yahoo and
Adobe, get panned for similar moves as trying to eliminate competing products
or otherwise flailing capital.

As i see it, Adobe identified a group of devs uniquely qualified to bring
domain knowledge to their team, as well as mobile expertise they may have
lacked. This strikes me as a reasonable strategic move on their part.

~~~
mmanfrin
I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but
that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe.

Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you
talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were
buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning
the possible shuttering of the purchased service?

People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or
Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the
time being.

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koenbok
I think the competition is Sketch and Pixate.

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craigching
Would you mind providing links to both of those? I googled for "sketch" but
would rather be sure I have what everyone is talking about.

EDIT: Ok, this [1] and [2] would seem to be what everyone is talking about.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[1] --
[http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/](http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/)
[2] -- [http://www.pixate.com](http://www.pixate.com)

~~~
MichaelApproved
Until I saw your link, I thought everyone was referring to Skitch, the much
more limited graphic editor. I was surprised that it was seen as competition.

[https://evernote.com/skitch/](https://evernote.com/skitch/)

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bwang29
It's very sad to see Aviary go and didn't choose to continue pushing their web
editors to a more advanced audience and photo hobbyists. If they're abandoning
plans moving forward in the web, Polarr
([https://www.polarr.co/](https://www.polarr.co/)) might just be the last
player trying to push web photo editing experience. It always seems like the
web has not done with photo processing yet though companies are all jumping
into mobile these days or moving on to video processing.

~~~
chenyisheng
Just signed up and find Polarr is probably a much better on-line photo editing
platform for me. It is what I call Lightroom-on-demand! Plus, there are much
more potentials for its intelligent personal style learning.

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taude
Gotta say I'm surprised this didn't happen years ago when Aviary made all
those flash-based web tools for editing Vectors, photos, etc...

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xxdesmus
I'm really shocked this didn't happen months ago actually. Seemed like a very
logical fit for Adobe. I just hope they don't ruin Aviary now.

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brianbreslin
Honestly I expected this to happen 2+ years ago. Glad to hear the Aviary team
held on, since I never heard of anyone paying/using for their amazing tools
(which were cutting edge back when they launched).

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samsolomon
I have to worry every time Adobe makes an acquisition. Seldom do the products
improve.

~~~
wldcordeiro
Flash Professional improved. Typekit improved and I would say Behance has
improved. I know it's cool to crap on Adobe but they've gotten a lot better in
recent years.

 _EDIT_ Changed Illustrator to Flash Professional. Forgot which was an
acquisition.

~~~
cpr
You mean Photoshop, not Illustrator, improved? The latter was Adobe's first
app and lovingly crafted by Warnock and crew.

(I know, because I saw them with my own eyes. ;-)

~~~
wldcordeiro
Ah yeah, I don't know why I said Illustrator. I might have been thinking of
the Flash Professional program, which has improved but Flash itself is on its
way out.

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Xeoncross
There really isn't any other software to compete at this point. Aviary and
Gimp were the only Photoshop competitors. Inkscape and Aviary were the only
Illustrator competitors.

~~~
ThomPete
There is a reason for this. It makes no sense to make a photoshop competitor
as this is not where we are heading.

Instead we are heading towards vectors as the primary asset which means toward
visual editors that allow for scripting and much more granular control off
assets such as animiation.

In 5-10 years ex. Sketch and other much more dynamic environments will be one
of the de-facto standards as the older generations retire and the new ones
come in.

Photoshop is the Quark of our time and it's heading for retirement I think.

P.S. I am part of the older generation and still uses Illustrator and
sometimes Photoshop. I loved Fireworks but Adobe killed it.

However, having played around with Sketch I think I see where things are
heading.

~~~
jpablo
Photoshop is for editing photos, not for drawing "assets". Unless you are
trying to tell me that digital cameras will produce a vector drawing of
scenes, I don't see bitmap editing software going away anytime soon, or ever.

~~~
endergen
Photoshop is not used primarily for editing photos in the software industry
from my experience. In a world with responsive design needs vector based just
gives you more versions of assets at different resolutions for less effort
than any other approach.

Sure photo editing is one use for it. But much of it is in creating icons,
mockups, non photo realistic things, and more.

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nkozyra
How Photoshop is used doesn't really matter - it's intended as a photo editing
product. Adobe already has an illustration / vector product and there's a
reason they're separate.

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ThomPete
How it's intended is most certainly what doesn't matter given how many people
use it for other things than photo-editing.

~~~
nkozyra
First, I'd say "most people" is anecdotal and supposition.

Second, even if "most people" used Microsoft Word to build web pages I
wouldn't treat it like a web IDE.

~~~
ThomPete
Which is why I never said it was that categorically so why the strawman?

But you know being a designer having worked with designers, having had a large
design agency and done some work for Adobe I do consider myself fairly
informed on the matter.

Whether you wanted to consider it a web IDE is besides the point. I remember
the days when notepad was considered the gold standard.

If it helps you get the work done who care about what it was supposed to help
them with.

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ninavizz
If Aviary owns any patents in the photo-editing realm, those alone were worth
the acquisition to Adobe. Aviary has active partnerships with Yahoo! Mail and
others, as their primary built-in photo-editing default utility. The second
part of the win for Adobe, is they can now slather the Adobe brand, all over
where the Aviary brand is now prominent, in those partnerships. That's what
matters to the money folks.

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dharma1
nice. I think it's just a question of time until someone makes a web based
Photoshop killer again though. Wonder how much of Adobe's revenue is based on
Photoshop (or inclusion of Photoshop in CC)

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CGudapati
I think a web based killer is very far away in the time line. I recently was
trying to make a huge gird in Photoshop and my i7+10gbRAM computer was unable
to handle it. I think very simple stuff like annotating and cropping/red-eye
fix can be done but I think a web based photo editor will fail when huge
performance is required.

~~~
orbifold
Not sure what your exact setup was, but your graphics card might simply have
run out of memory. Which would then have happened pretty much independently
from the software you were using.

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kclay
This took to long to happen, Congrats for them.

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yangshun
Anybody knows the deal amount?

