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by ZephyrBlu 1056 days ago
Good luck taking on Adobe with 2 engineers.
3 comments

Adobe seems exeptionally unproductive with incredible product stagnation so this doesn't seem that infeasible to me.
Exceptionally unproductive? What are you on about? Could they make larger swings? Sure. Are they exceptionally unproductive? Compared to whom? They dominate pretty much all market segments they're in. For example, they took on Apple, after a grudge, and won (Apple had something to do with that too). AI showed up, Adobe is pretty much the only major established player that put it in consumer hands ASAP and in a way that is both legal and makes great sense. Others (majors), if they even showed up with anything AI leaned on others (Microsoft -> OpenAI).

Adobe is moving at a steady strong pace which one cannot ignore. They don't have ferocity or (sometimes) velocity of a hungry small player.. yet, there aren't any in their space. There's Autodesk (lol) and of smaller in video there is The Foundry (if you want to see exceptionally unproductive, at small scale).

> Compared to whom? - Procreate

- Figma

- Blender

- Maxon

- Davinchi

- Autodesk

- Stability

Honestly hard to name a company in the space shipping less than Adobe.

I'm the last person to stand behind Adobe (where my linux apps at?), but:

- procreate - yes, I agree. They do compete there and procreate is iPad only. Pricing is what sets them apart and Adobe being a bit stupid there

- Figma - yes and it's Adobe now.

- Blender and Maxon are in different space. Unless you consider Blender's subpar video capabilities and Maxon's buying of video plugins (for Adobe programs). Also, Maxon.. come on, talking about stale. C4D "light" is also part of After Effects.

- Blackmagic is in hardware business. Their Fusion (bought) is stale af. AVID might be a better comparison.

- Autodesk - only overlap is between Flame and Lustre. Flame is in another space where they don't compete and Lustre has been stale (just like Adobe's CC offerings, seems both ceeded to free DaVinci Resolve)

- Stability - look at how wonderfully Adobe actually did put out AI and integrated it well with Photoshop!

Dunno how anyone can un-ironically call anything stale next to Adobes 10 year track record.

> Pricing is what sets them apart

Nah the whole app is built on modern technology, Adobes dusty old apps chugging away on single cores struggling to draw a paint stroke are pretty laughable compared to Procreate. All this is stuff Adobe could have shipped 10-15 years ago in Photoshop if they cared at all.

> Blender and Maxon are in different space

It's all the same space, if you're differentiating 3D from 2D design you're living in the past. Besides we're talking about creative tools shipping features so it's irrelevant as long as its a tool.

https://www.photopea.com/ started as a hobby project of a single guy and is surprisingly close to at least the core functionalities of Photoshop, certainly better than most open source applications.
Well Figma started eating their lunch in 2015 having started with a 4 millions seed round and 15 employees for two years so it’s clearly is doable to take on Adobe with far less money that they themselves spend provided your offer is good.
Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.

$235k and 2 engineers is completely different to $4M and 15 employees. Not to mention that it was 5-7yrs before Figma had any revenue.

"While Figma was founded in 2011, the first five years were spent trying to get to product. The company printed its first dollar in revenue in 2017 and will hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2022"

https://futurumgroup.com/insights/adobes-stock-got-slammed-f...

Figma is an outlier. "it's clearly doable to take on Adobe with far less money", he says about one of the fastest growing decacorn startups in history.

> Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.

Thank you for being condescending. If you expected being a bully might shield you from tearing apart your argument you will be very disappointed.

15 people is a lot closer to two than to Adobe which is the point of my comment you entirely fail to grasp.

Every companies taking out a large companies is an outlier by definition. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist and remains a clear counterexample to your extremely wrong original opinion.

This discussion is finished as far as I’m concerned by the way. You have clearly demonstrated you are not worth talking to. I will let you massage your fragile ego by yourself.

Your timeline is wrong (Figma wasn't even released until 2016). I have a piece covering Photoshop to Sketch to Figma that I think illustrates in detail how the rise of Figma happened https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...
Yes, you are right. I was confused by what I read as they started offering a free preview in December 2015 and was convinced they released at the same time they did their serie A.