Out of context? Sure. But Adobe isn't going to just buy it, operate it, and collect its revenue.
Adobe rightfully sees itself standing on the edge of a cliff. Adobe XD, despite having some great features, was handily clobbered in the market first by Sketch, and then by the vastly lighter-weight Figma. Beyond that, Figma has a great, intuitive, smooth interface for making vector graphics. It's not nearly as powerful as Illustrator, but easily does what most interface and web designers need, and that's probably a huge chunk of Illustrator's market rather than the more intensive digital artist users.
If they lose Illustrator, the ecosystem is a lot less valuable. Photoshop has significant competition from relative newcomers and print media, etc. made in InDesign is has much less gravity than it used to.
So rather than trying to make better and more innovative products in earnest, they're going to try to buy and suppress their competition just like Autodesk and so many other dinosaur graphics companies.
I would say that for many users, Photoshop suffers from feature bloat even more than Illustrator does.
In my personal usage, nothing that’s been added since CS1/CS2 has much meaningful impact. Heck rewinding to 7.x or even 6.x would pose only minor inconveniences.
Sure, but in terms of broad software design industrial adoption, which is the only relevant metric when looking at Figma, those users wouldn't factor in. Anyone tinkering with old standalone versions of Adobe programs would not likely become paying Adobe Ecosystem customers regardless of how great the new Photoshop features were.
Most companies just pop users into their corporate CC site license and give them a brand new fast laptop to run it on and be done with it. It's basically SAAS at this point.
What's growth rate on that revenue though? If it's like 20-30% growth per year... you're talking a pretty short amount of time (3-5 years) until that revenue multiplier is at parity with many publicly traded tech companies.
Adobe rightfully sees itself standing on the edge of a cliff. Adobe XD, despite having some great features, was handily clobbered in the market first by Sketch, and then by the vastly lighter-weight Figma. Beyond that, Figma has a great, intuitive, smooth interface for making vector graphics. It's not nearly as powerful as Illustrator, but easily does what most interface and web designers need, and that's probably a huge chunk of Illustrator's market rather than the more intensive digital artist users.
If they lose Illustrator, the ecosystem is a lot less valuable. Photoshop has significant competition from relative newcomers and print media, etc. made in InDesign is has much less gravity than it used to.
So rather than trying to make better and more innovative products in earnest, they're going to try to buy and suppress their competition just like Autodesk and so many other dinosaur graphics companies.