Life Without Adobe?
Posted by Tonio Loewald on 10/5/07 in Featured, Graphics, Opinions, Video, Web
When Adobe announced CS3, like many owners of Intel Macs I was very happy. This happiness didn’t last long — just trying to figure out which of Adobe’s CS3 bundles I (a) wanted and (b) was eligible to upgrade to was not easy. Like many pro web developers, I have Adobe Creative Suite (version 1, not 2) and Macromedia Studio 8 Professional. You’d think Adobe would toss a bone to folks who, in essence, paid twice for the prerequisites to CS3, but no. We can certainly upgrade to Adobe CS3 for Web Developers twice, but we don’t get any kind of break if we want to get the Master suite.
Indeed, one puzzling aspect of Adobe’s product strategy is its obliviousness to the emergence of online video. This is surely an ideal time to sell cheap sidegrades to Premiere and After Effects to Flash and Web developers, especially if simple tools for producing and embedding FLV content were provided. Instead, Adobe charges anyone trying to move in that direction a premium and doesn’t offer any suitable bundles aside from the “Master” suite which costs about $1000 on top of the upgrade price.
Anyway, Adobe seems to be one of the last great bastions of arrogance in the software world. (Autodesk is another.) While everyone else has been streamlining the process of buying, installing, using, and affording their software, Adobe has been making their pricing model more complex (there are now two versions of Photoshop, for example), installation more bizarre, usage less reliable (starting with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7). Adobe software “phones home” when you launch it and sometimes won’t launch at all if Adobe’s servers are misbehaving — you can disable this behavior, but it’s not easy, and their prices have either remained steady or risen.
With all of these annoyances, it is starting to dawn on a lot of people that Adobe is due for some comeuppance. The question is, can you do without Adobe’s flagship applications?
Hard to Replace
Flash and Photoshop are probably the most irreplaceable Adobe applications. There are a number of cheap, free, and open source third-party competitors to Flash (SWF is actually a pretty well-documented format), but none of them can really be taken seriously yet. Flash’s competitors are desperately far behind the real thing in terms of feature support (and Macromedia and Adobe were very good at getting Flash widely adopted and up-to-date, in stark contrast with Shockwave) and Flash is pretty much the single most important “plugin” format in the web. Even if you hate Flash advertising, Flash is by-and-large superior to Java for cross-platform client-side web application programming. The sad thing about Flash’s indispensability is that Flash is hardly the most wonderful application to work with. It’s the incredible penetration of the Flash plugin that makes the Flash development environment indispensable for web development.
The real problem for Adobe is that there’s a very good alternative to Flash CS3, and that’s Flash 8, or Flash MX 2004. The problem is that Adobe has been trying to turn ActionScript into JavaScript, not by making ActionScript more like JavaScript, but by futzing around with standards bodies (and failing). The result is ActionScript 3, which manages to combine the robustness of ActionScript 2 with the charm and simplicity of Java. It also manages to be so utterly different from ActionScript 2 that learning it involves moving to a completely different runtime environment (every class has been refactored and renamed) and a different language that isn’t ActionScript (2) and isn’t JavaScript either. The end result of all this is that time spent learning ActionScript 3 may be wasted, since uniting ActionScript with JavaScript will probably entail reinventing the wheel again.
Adobe Photoshop’s indispensability comes precisely from its ease of use and functionality. Despite having a truly ludicrous amount of functionality, it remains relatively uncluttered, and there’s almost no graphical task for which Photoshop is not required at some point (whether it’s publishing, video, 3d, game development, UI design, or scientific visualization). Photoshop’s few competitors (Paintshop Pro, The GIMP, Painter, Paint.net) lag behind it in both functionality and ease of use (and, in general, lag behind it by many, many versions). For the time being, if you need to work with bitmapped images, you really need Photoshop — although, as with Flash, you may not need the latest version.
Somewhat Replaceable
Adobe Illustrator has become more difficult to replace with Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (and cancellation of Freehand). Unlike Photoshop, there are numerous serious would-be competitors in the cheap software space (Lineform, Eazydraw, Intaglio) but none of them are really competitive in terms of features or usability. (It’s quite depressing, really, because these programs don’t fail so much on advanced functionality such as filter effects (thanks to Core Image) but on basic drawing functions, such as creating, selecting, and manipulating vertices and control handles.) Even so, unless you are a graphic designer, you can probably live with one of Illustrator’s cheaper replacements. They’ll bug you, but you can live with them.
Indesign can be replaced with Quark XPress, but that’s kind of like selling your soul to a different devil. For most Mac Users, Indesign can be replaced with Pages. For many casual desktop publishers, Microsoft Word offers all the functionality they need and is easier to use (which doesn’t say much for Indesign’s usability — “Easier to use than Quark XPress” is not a very convincing slogan). In any event, unless you’re a desktop publishing pro with a specific need for Indesign, you can safely ignore it.
Lightroom may turn out to be another winner for Adobe, depending on whether Apple successfully addresses Aperture’s performance and quality issues, and whether enough PC-based photographers care enough about their work to go beyond merely good software they can get for free (e.g. Picasa).
Coldfusion is not going anywhere soon, simply because some people are highly invested in it, and migrating code to a new platform just for its own sake is just not worth it. That said, Coldfusion has not gained ease-of-use and functionality at anywhere near the rate necessary to remain relevant in a world with PHP5 and Ruby-on-Rails, both of which are free and run on commodity-priced servers. And PHP is supported by a commercial vendor who will sell you integrated development tools with real debuggers that run on any platform you care about.
Dreamweaver is probably still the best WYSIWYG round-trip html editor out there (I think Macromedia tried to trademark “round-trip” at some point). It lets you visually lay out web pages, it produces html that sucks less than anything produced by viable competitors (well, there was this program called GoLive…), and its integrated text editor isn’t completely awful… the problem is that the web developer market is being very well served by excellent text editors on the one hand, and free/cheap/online WYSIWYG editors on the other hand. If you’re a pro, Dreamweaver is basically irrelevant — at best a program you use for a few minutes once in a while to do some quick visual layout that would be tedious to do in code. If you’re a casual web developer, Dreamweaver is way too heavy, complex, and obscure for your purposes.
After Effects is an excellent piece of software (both highly capable and very lightweight for what it does) that is simply living in an enormously crowded space. Once upon a time, the only program that did what it did on non-SGI hardware, it is now facing competition from below (Motion and Final Cut Pro for example) and above (Shake is far more capable and Apple is selling it for $499). On the Windows side, Autodesk is assaulting it from several directions. If you love After Effects for its clean user interface and don’t mind its price, there’s no reason not to use it, but if you just want to ditch Adobe you have a lot of choices.
Acrobat has a lot of functionality that, say, Preview on the Mac and Foxit on Windows don’t have. The problem for Adobe is that (a) we don’t need that extra functionality, and (b) we don’t like Acrobat. It’s much easier to use the Print dialog (in OS X) to create a PDF, and Preview launches faster and, frankly, works better as a document reader than Acrobat. (Just the search function leaves Acrobat in the dust.)
Director was only ever indispensable to Director developers, but it’s losing relevance even in that shrinking market. Largely because of Macromedia’s bungling with shockwave (in essence they messed around with the plugin too much so that, for a long time, pretty much any time you visited a shockwave site you’d be asked to download a huge plugin) Director has become all-but-useless for web development, and because of Macromedia’s stunning neglect (essentially selling empty updates since 1999) its feature set is uninspiring and its user base is alienated. It’s very sad, because Director could still be a very strong product if anyone cared enough to (a) use OpenGL/DirectX to accelerate its 2d graphics, (b) update its 2d compositing features, and (c) update its 3d engine.
Premiere fills the yawning need for a video editor that doesn’t suck but isn’t terribly powerful and expensive. Until recently Premiere had abandoned Mac users altogether but recently has made a triumphant return to OS X with what many are heralding as a viable option to Final Cut Pro for novice to semi-advanced editors. I have not played with the product yet so it is not fair to offer up any verdicts here but Anthony Burokas has recently posted a full review of the beta here. From the article Anthony states: “Premiere Pro CS3 is a good tool and a worthwhile new option for Mac editors.”
Conclusions
It seems to me that, despite its acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe is really quite vulnerable to competition in most of its products’ niches, and it shouldn’t be thinking (let alone saying) things like their customers aren’t price-sensitive. I am guessing that most of Adobe’s customers have, at best, been taken aback by Adobe’s pricing and bundling of CS3, and many of us are wondering which Adobe products we really really need. As illustrated above, for the vast majority of Adobe’s customers, the answer is either “Adobe Photoshop” or “Adobe Photoshop and Flash”. Adobe is very rapidly turning itself into a two-product company with customers ready and willing to jump ship, once they’re able. Even if key products, such as Photoshop and Flash, have no external competitors, many customers will figure out ways to avoid having to upgrade at all - Photoshop 6 (on Windows) and 7 (on the Mac) are quite adequate replacements for Photoshop CS3 for many users.
All of the breathtaking icons above are the work of designer Adam Betts and the entire icon set can be downloaded for free here.
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But on the topic of cost - I simply do not understand why folks would only look at the price of the product. It’s silly. You also have to look at the cost of development. The cost of any (possible) ad ons. Etc. I’m willing to pay for CF because of what it gives me out of the box and the speed of development. Just like I’m willing to pay for Apple’s products. My last desktop was probably twice the price of what a Dell would have cost, but I find myself more productive (and more happy) under OSX.
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