Is Adobe Losing The Plot?

This is a forum topic for discussing the article "Is Adobe Losing The Plot?":

http://www.elated.com/articles/is-adobe-losing-the-plot/

Simon wonders aloud if Adobe are losing their way. Stability, pricing and interface issues seem to be affecting the way Adobe is perceived in the marketplace.

Nice article Si! I haven't used Photoshop CS4 myself but even CS3's interface is a bit too "quirky" for my tastes (with the whole palette dock business).

Adobe's in an interesting position in the industry. Having swallowed up Macromedia it's having to focus in a lot of disparate areas, and I wonder if it's just becoming too fragmented as a company:

* Photo manipulation/design
* Print design and print publishing
* Web design
* Web development

It strikes me that they're turning into a jack of all trades, master of none. I mean, how can you be the best in the world at print publishing software *and* at web development platforms?

I see that they're now really starting to push Flash as a mobile development platform too:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138961/Adobe_brings_Flash_apps_to_the_iPhone

http://moblinzone.com/blog/586/64/Decoding_the_OSP,_and_Adobes_big_device_push

http://www.openscreenproject.org/

So that's yet another thing they're trying to get into.

With all this going on I'm not surprised that their "less exciting" apps such as Photoshop are suffering. Adobe currently seems much more interested in the web/mobile app development arena. They can't be the best in everything all at the same time.

Matt

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

The other big question of course: Will Adobe succeed in getting Flash onto the iPhone?

http://infoworld.com/d/developer-world/flash-iphone-hail-mary-pass-adobe-022

I don't agree with everything in that article - I'd say Flash is a nice cross-platform way to build simple, graphical apps - but maybe he has a point with "Flash's grip on the browser is slipping". Apple and others are really pushing HTML5, and I can see Flash becoming more and more marginalised in the next few years...

Matt

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

Personally, I've taken to using Gimp (www.gimp.org) and Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) rather than having to relearn the interface every time a new version appears and pay a lot of money for the privilege

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

I used to use Gimp a fair bit, though I haven't played with Inkscape yet. Gimp is pretty powerful and can do most of the things a professional designer needs. However, despite Photoshop's little quirks and foibles I've always found it more comfortable to use than Gimp. Maybe it's just what you're used to.

I know Simon hates Gimp so no doubt he'll chime in on this

Matt

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

You know what? To be all fair and nice, I downloaded GIMP before I answered this. Not only has the UI been designed by sandal-wearing longhairs on acid, but I can't even work out how to make a new file!

And THAT, is why Gimp will always be a fail for any use other than hippies fiddling around on Linux.

Simon

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ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates

Now come on Simon, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think


Yeah I suppose the UI may be a little arcane, possibly.

--
Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

"I can't even work out how to make a new file"

Err... File > New by any chance?!

Matt

--
Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

There. is. no. file. menu.

Seriously, where is it? Clearly there must be one somewhere, but it's not where it should be!

Simon

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ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates

Aah. Hang on. The menus are at the window level! When I first launched it I didn't get the initial little window that offered me a menu, instead giving me just the vertical palettes.

Aaaargh! But now, I click on the text tool, click in the new file, and I can't type! Oh, wait, I double click, then enter my text in a wee popup, and hit the intuitively named "Close" to actually put that in my document window. And the antialiasing! What are they thinking?

Kill me, kill me now. I'm sorry, but anyone that uses this is a masochistic miser. It absolutely falls into that open-source trap of appearing to be useful, but actually being a time-sucking, slow, buggy abomination. No-one with an actual job to do should ever use this.

Awful, awful software.

Simon

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ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates

Adobe are laying off 680 staff:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8353863.stm

You can only hope that some of them go on to make better software.

Simon

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ELATED : )
http://www.PageKits.com
Professional Website Templates

This is more a help request than a comment, but it relates to Adobe. I had cs4 installed on my Vista machine. No problems. I wiped the machine and installed Win 7 enterprise. Now, when I try to install cs4, after the 1 hour two disk install marathon, I get a message saying "done, with errors" on all the main apps (Acrobat 9pro and some other minor things do install successfully). Adobe support advisor leads me to some articles that suggest reg edit fixes (something about color management in one), but I'm not looking forward to going down that road. Has anyone heard of this problem. Since Adobe has articles on it it must be out there. Is adobe coming out with a fix. One last note: I set up a virtual machine within the win 7 system running xp and got the same error. As I implied at the beginning these disks worked fine on this machine with vista.

Hi Johnny,

Sorry, I don't know about that one. There's a forum post about it here though:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2193677

Simon

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