Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU.
Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals.
So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left.
I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use.
EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape.
Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.
CC was the second time they burned people who loved their products. Pagemaker being replaced with InDesign drove a lot of us crazy too. I had been using Pagemaker since it was called Aldus pagemaker, stuck with it through quark becoming more popular, then when Adobe breathed new life into it, and also offered Photoshop.. I was all in. InDesign didn't just make me leave Adobe, it made me realize it was time to give ownership of that little newspaper hobby to someone else and do something else with my extra time. I hear from friends it's now a pretty decent tool, but I just lost interest in the whole field, since it was never something I did professionally anyway.
I am currently very happy with the Affinity Suite. Lots of updates, one time payment that does not cost a fortune. It’s great for both pro work and doing some hobby work.
I worked extensively with Adobe InDesign, InCopy, and Photoshop while working in magazines. Not much on designs but worked on existing files and templates form the designers as well as integrations.
After I left I was looking for a solution and couldn’t justify Adobe’s pricing for my own small project and picked up the Affinity suite for a song while it was on sale last autumn.
It’s great. It doesn’t have absolutely everything and I’ve had to learn new controls and all that but it’s not hard to learn and they’ve done everything I’ve needed them to do.
For a seasoned user of InDesign it’s entirely different and I could understand hesitation—I’ve known designers who tried and just couldn’t get the workflow down but for me it’s been fantastic.
I love Affinity Photo Design Publish. Have the apps on iOS, Windows, MacOS.
I am very much a hobbyist, but I'm missing things I got used to in Photoshop.
If there's that one way to get a look that you've developed, it's disruptive to move to a different tool.
I've found this to be more difficult for creative work than for more procedural tasks. I can roughly translate between AppleScript or shell scripting or Python. But if a particular filter or plug-in isn't there, it's a lot of work to force it through a different pipeline.
Did they failed to present an acceptable transition route, or did it fail to satisfy a specific important use case, or did the interface not facilitate your workflow? I’ve done a ton of layout in InDesign and think it’s decent. I’d say the typesetting tools are fantastic, but it doesn’t exactly spark joy. I spent probably 12 hours total in PageMaker in a high school graphic design class 25 years ago, so I don’t have a real reference point. Curious what the tipping point was in your instance.
I understand your frustration in what Adobe is doing, but your post is just flat out wrong. Your projecting this annoyance onto everyone and this product too.
‘ So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left’, according to my search Creative Cloud has 26 million paid members and is only increasing, at a fairly healthy rate too.
I hate it too and so do most that pay it but there customers certainly didn’t leave and this certainly has nothing to do with XD failing, the post explains quite clearly the issues.
A lot of creatives that use/would use XD already have a subscription to creative cloud that would pay for it, so it’s irrelevant, you just wanted to moan about the subscription and attach that complaint to this.
You can both be present physically and absent with your mind.
Yes, their cloud subscription is growing in numbers. And my company pays for a subscription for me, so I'm 1 additional user and $200 (or whatever) in additional monthly revenue. But we are only subscribers because they are holding our data hostage with their proprietary file format. As soon as any app with good enough Photoshop PSD and Adobe Illustrator AI import comes around, we'll jump ship.
With that in mind, the fact that XD would lock us into yet another proprietary file format from Adobe is a death blow. We decided not to use it before even evaluating it, because it would increase our vendor lock-in. That's why I said in my original comment: "XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use". If XD files become worthless without an Adobe subscription, then we're not interested in producing them.
So technically you are correct that we're still a paying customer so we technically haven't left yet. But our mind and our loyalty is long gone. That's what I tried to say. People like my company do not wish to continue being a customer. Accordingly, they don't care about new products.
"you just wanted to moan about the subscription". No, I see this as a strategy mistake. Photoshop became popular because it was so easy for everyone to get a cheap old copy and start using it. Now that Adobe has locked out most of the hobbyists, where is the next generation of experts going to come from? Who is going to pay $600 annually just to practice with Adobe XD instead of using a free competitor?
I'd say you can see the same with 3ds max, which once was the undoubted king of 3d content creation software. By now, all the young people use Blender. It's free and almost as good. I predict in 10 years 3ds max will be obsolete and Blender will become the new standard.
as someone from the 90s desktop publishing scene myself, I would say that the parent post is accurate from the seat of a person faced with the transition to cloud. 26 million subscribers and growing, reflects network power, ease of acquisition of new customers, institutional users, and just basically people on the further edges of the original "boom". Just because the current model does build and grow subscriptions per month, at those prices, under those terms, does not mean that the observations from the seat of an individual person, is wrong or invalid.
"After the customers left" might mean "after the customers who thrived in the previous era left", and then you would both be right.
Enterprise loves SaaS, because it solves problems they had (smoothing out purchasing, avoiding endless reauthorization and upgrade planning coordination), while not creating any problems (because they were always going to upgrade anyway). Hence the uptake and good numbers.
A lot of consumers hate SaaS, because it solves no problems they had (purchasing and upgrading were easy, if they chose), and creates new problems. They had previously been able to create indistinguishable output with an older version, albeit missing some features, to minimize recurring cost. And now that's no longer an option.
So you've made things easier for a group that spends a ton of money, but doesn't speak publicly on the internet (enterprise), which makes your metrics look nice. And you've made things harder / impossible for a group that does speak publicly on the internet (consumers), which makes your sentiment look bad.
I have used Adobe CC under a few companies. It has a bad habit of not allowing you to login, either producing a white screen or looping back to the login prompt. The only resolution has been to fully uninstall and reinstall it.
Very frustrating. Extremely hard to deploy via management tools.
I should have caveated that: web-based SaaS. Adobe's installers have always felt like Microsoft-levels of legacy preservation ("We'll just wrap +1 layer over top, and avoid changing anything underneath") without Microsoft-levels of technical architecture talent.
What percentage are business users? My company pays for a license to creative cloud for me. But for personal use it is too expensive, so I use Affinity suite. If students use something cheaper like Affinity suite and many professionals use affinity suite for their personal use, there may come a time where businesses realize that they don’t actually have to pay out for creative cloud.
Let’s not forget that Photoshop has always been expensive and became the de facto photo editor because they were so far ahead of everyone when piracy was rampant. That’s the only way most people were Photoshop literate by the time they entered the job market.
This was discussed frequently inside Abobe, but the solutions always flowed back to more control instead of more openness. Now Adobe is going to push tech exoticism while suites like Affinity eat up the market.
To this day pirating adobe's stuff is straight forward. They don't seem to be trying really hard to sto piracy probably because they know their money comes from enterprise. To put things in perspective the same crack has been working for releases from the last 2 years. If they really wanted to keep piracy at bay they could have made the lives of people who don't pay harder.
Feedback to the ChildOfChaos: There were a lot of points made by the OP, which were not flat out wrong, and as you noted, are more nuanced than the OP expressed. For instance, on Macs, this is true with default settings “CreativeCloud, that universally hated DRM app that randomly maxes out your CPU,” where one has to hunt and kill Abode’s processes manually to get things under control. As for XD specifically, it was an inferior product to Sketch when it was launched, which slowed its adoption in addition to the subscription pricing (note that this is a US market-centric point of view and opinion). However, overtime XD improved (aside Figma did too), and individuals heavily invested in the CC integrations started getting enough from CC/XD to use it. The OP is likely giving a point and time opinion (at roll out), and some of the original issues presented as black-and-white are much more of shades of gray, especially when considering how things have changed with time.
"Adobe burned all bridges with their customers when they introduced CreativeCloud"
I don't like Adobe and don't use their apps any more, but their apps continue to dominate the design, illustration and publishing fields. That is unlikely to change any time in the near future.
I'm using the Affinity apps - the apps are successful and thriving, but making little dent on Adobe's influence on the industry. (Affinity proves an app doesn't need to displace or overtake an existing app, but can carve out their own successful market segment.)
Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives (XD and Fresco for the iPad) don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps.
However, there are some Adobe apps like After Effects that simply don't have any serious competition. Also, there are thousands of tutorials for Adobe apps that continue to make them attractive to learn. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more tutorials for Photoshop than any other software (or even programming language) in existence.
Interesting aside: The file specification for .sketch files is available on the Sketch website. This means Adobe XD and Figma can import Sketch files. The reverse is not true: neither Figma or XD publish their file format specifications.
> Adobe were caught-out with the success of Sketch and Figma for UI design, and with the Procreate painting app on the iPad. My impression is that Adobe's alternatives - XD and Fresco for the iPad - don't share the same "mindshare" among designers as those other apps.
Yes, but that’s not because they were late to the party. They had the app for this kind of work in Adobe Fireworks and they shut it down with no migration path. That’s what opened the market up for Sketch and later Figma. Now that the latter exist, there’s no reason to pay Adobe’s extortionate prices, or buy into their monopolistic business practices.
>> the Substance3D communities became a ghost town
This is the same time they added a dark pattern removing 3D support from Photoshop, which most of us had taken for granted for the last 10 years. Like we need to pay for a new subscription now and break our pipeline for fast painting models? They can fuck off.
Perpetual licenses to Substance products are still available on Steam [1], at least for now. They are more expensive, but so far there has always been a -33% discount on release.
That's just 1 out of 4 apps. You need at least Painter, Designer and B2M.
Plus it seems that in addition to buying this app, you also need to rent a subscription if you want access to the preset library (which used to be included for free).
I'm a little bit in the music production scene, and literally never see or hear anyone uses Audition. Not on posts on reddit, not on tutorials on YT.
On it's wikipedia page it says that it's a DAW (and not exclusively an editing station), so the best and most popular DAWs today are those that have been so for the last two decades: Cubase, Pro-tools, Logic, Ableton. The first three have top notch audio editing capabilities, and none of them require a subscription.
Thanks. I'm mostly interested in the audio analysis workflows. Spectrum/frequency analysis, stereo/spatial analysis, chirp generation, perhaps basic additive synthesis capabilities (ability to generate waves with shape and frequency). Less interested on the DAW side (MIDI, Sequencing, VSTs, etc). The DAWs you've mentioned there are generally great, but are often less geared towards the workflows I'm after...
Audition isn't really a music-production DAW - in fact, it doesn't even support MIDI or VST generator plugins. It's mostly an audio recorder and editing software for movie dialogue, game audio, podcasts etc.
Audition used to be Cool Edit Pro. I really loved the UI of that program back in the day. I don't know what it's like these days, but back then (either the late 90s or the early 2000s, I can't quite remember) it was great as a wave file editor and a multi-track mixer.
Ninja'd - was about to write the same but hit refresh beforehand. Syntrillium's Cool Edit Pro did have a multi-track recording and arrangement view, it was no longer a purely sample-based editor (Cool Edit 2000 and earlier did not have this feature, IIRC).
I also don't know how it has changed when it got taken over.
Audacity is audio Notepad. That it runs everywhere is a plus; on the other hand, it's super clunky, it doesn't act like any other DAW, and its editing behaviors are well behind the curve.
I use Logic Pro for most things and have a dedicated, old Mac to run it, but Reaper is quite good and like $60 if one's on Windows or Linux (and isn't nearly as inscrutable as Ardour). Ableton Live is another stand-by and it runs on a Mac.
But in 2022 it's hard to recommend Audacity for much of anything, even aside from their drama problems.
There are many "Audition alternatives", but it's hard to recommend anything without knowing what you want it for. Audacity might be OK if your needs are very basic. Pro-tools is kind of the industry standard DAW. Reaper is sort-of-free and quite popular. Ardour is FLOSS and good (although with paid binaries). Izotope RX9 is brilliant for cleaning up audio clips. Mixbus is supposed to have a great emulation of classic analogue mixers. Hindenburg is popular with podcasters. Etc.
I might add that if you’re looking purely for a sample editor, so no multitrack, on OS X, Twistedwave for me feels closest to the CoolEdit I grew up on. Audacity’s is probably the first one to try because FLOSS. I struggle with its UI at times—although maybe they’ve implemented scroll to zoom since I last tried it. And I don’t like how everything’s conceptualised as a ‘project’ that needs to be exported, even when working on a single file. I just want to open a file, modify and save it. Gimp made a similar mistake at some point…
For simple audio track editing (not music production), use one of the forks of Audacity. Audacity started going spooky by adding telemetry and age restrictions. Good ones are Tenacity [1], and Audacium [2].
For music production, I've been using Studio One [3] for the last couple years, and it's truly the mosf straightforward and beautiful DAW I've ever used. Though, it's not free and open source, which is a downside for me. It's one of the few proprietary software I care to own.
Zrythm [4], however, has been catching my eye lately, and I'm looking forward to it maturing to the point where I can finally move to a FOSS DAW.
I used audition before it was bought by adobe, and it was a very good audio editor. But today, almost anything is better than audition.
A wonderful, if a bit ugly and “raw” DAW is Reaper. I use it for everything. The big contenders are Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro. A lot of people, that create music, are using them. I like reaper the most because it is nimble and is still pretty complete.
Such an overblown issue IMO. And it was all rolled back anyway. They're actually trying really hard to improve audacity. Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback. If they had stonewalled the community and told them to fuck off it would've been a different story but that is most certainly not what happened.
> Yes a few missteps happened but the backlash was way out of proportion, especially given how approachable and responsive they were about all the negative feedback.
This has become standard operating procedure. Push your agenda until you receive backlash, then claim it was all a big misunderstanding, and that you are listening to feedback. Let things calm down for a few months, then push the controversial changes anyway.
People are picking up on that, and won‘t accept it anymore. I think that‘s great.
Current leadership has shown their hand and the probable long-term direction they are headed.
Maybe it‘s an honest mistake, but the community no longer seems to extend the benefit of the doubt, which is totally understandable. Fool me 42753 times, shame on me.
Yes, but look at Krita, for example. All of it functions are what people traditionally used Photoshop for. It has grown to be 25% of the Photoshop user base [1]. Adobe's revenue can grow even while its user-base is shrinking.
Creative Cloud is an incredible deal if you want to do professional work.
And you can, last I check, get it at a monthly rate or get licenses for smaller packages, so it makes doing intermittent professional or hobbyist work more accessible to a wider range of people.
Previously it was $1k+ software costs barrier to entry for almost any professional or semi-pro activity via most software publishers.
Yeah. The subscription pricing is a bummer for hobbyists or people who infrequently need it professionally. But professional users bought updates regularly anyway and probably ended up spending more money. Beyond the actual total price tag, there was a zero percent chance I’d have been able to fork over a lump sum of well over a grand for Illustrator, Photoshop, Bridge, InDesign, Premier and Acrobat/Distiller. Now for $60/mo I get all those with constant updates, support in case something goes FuBar the night before a deadline, plus the option to pop into After Effects or Audition or anything else I need to. Heck, Adobe Fonts probably saves me more than $60 in some months.
I don’t have any loyalty to Adobe and would jump ship if a professionally viable alternative came out that was less proprietary, let alone cheaper, but most of the alternatives just aren’t. I do think that’s changing, so we’ll see though.
Also, before, companies, schools, and universities could purchase a few perpetual licenses and use those for teaching. Now, they would need to spend much more on person-bound license rentals.
So I'd say XD never had a chance because it launched after the customers left.
I'm still being held hostage by them to access my old files, but for every new project, I go out of my way to avoid using any Adobe-specific file format. If others do the same, then XDs only chance is a truly open file format that other apps can also use.
EDIT: If I remember correctly, I released my first self-developed plug-in for Photoshop 5 around 1999. So I've been using Adobe products for a long time. Back then, plugins for hobbyist power users were a big market. Nowadays, that market is dead. All the hobbyists went to Gimp and Inkscape.
Similarly, the Substance3D communities became a ghost town more or less overnight when Adobe purchased the company and then removed Indie pricing. It went from $99 one-time on Steam to $49/month (min 12 months, so $588 annually) as part of Creative Cloud. Suddenly, Marmoset - their long-term competitor - became very attractive at a one-time $119 for students for a perpetual license. I also lost access to my old files there.