[bayindirh]

I think the main problem is how Adobe worded the change. They could have written

"We didn't renew our license with Pantone because it was eating into our profits, so you are on your own now. We also changed said colors to black, to make it easier to spot what you are missing. Have a nice day".

Instead they've written some corporate speak, and let the thing roll by itself.

[noirscape]

Oh absolutely, the wording Adobe used is abysmal in telling you exactly why they did it, but arguably that is the point.

Nobody wants to hear "yeah so we're killing the feature you're using because it's not profitable enough for us anymore", speaking from experience of this happening with certain FOSS projects (where profit is substituted with "Gary wrote this 5 years ago and we haven't seen him in 3 years so I'm going to yoink it before it starts causing bugs since I dont want to spend time maintaining Gary's code"). That's not an indictment of FOSS projects to be clear (free gift horse and all that), but it does show insight in how feature cuts will come across when done for those sorts of reasons.

The other problem is that sites like Kotaku[1] decided to run the story in a decisively false manner by suggesting that Pantone is trying to copyright the color spectrum. The ARSTechnica article is a slightly more nuanced take on that Kotaku article which was blatantly bad faith, but still overwhelmingly missing the point.

[1]: https://kotaku.com/photoshop-pantone-color-plugin-adobe-crea...

[awkward]

It's bad communication as a media play. Adobe drops the licensing in the most expedient and user hostile way possible, and puts the blame on Pantone.

Long term, this might be a better model for Pantone - they're building a direct relationship with the print shops and other businesses that actually need this feature. Short term, a lot of users just treated this as an alternate color picker and Adobe is trying to manage who gets the flack.

[bborud]

I'm no fan of Adobe, but to me this sounds like a completely legitimate business decision.

Of course they are not going to pass on the savings to the user, except perhaps indirectly by having a way of easing the shareholder pressure to increase revenue per user, and thereby being able to push license price increases into the future. (I don't know this is how it would play out, but it is a possibility).

Removing something they are bundling from Pantone today also gives Pantone an incentive to build a direct relationship to the users, which may actually be an opportunity in disguise for Pantone. Or perhaps not: Pantone might find that they are worse off if the market turns out to be smaller in terms of profit potential.

(Disclosure: I don't use Pantone. However I do use color palettes from various manufacturers of paints. Very occasionally. And my requirements aren't really at the level where I need to use a calibrated toolchain. I make pictures, I spray paint, and if it roughly looks like what I saw on screen I'm happy.)