[lylejantzi3rd]

A little off topic, but, if you'll indulge me: Why do you think nobody has been able to make a successful alternative to Photoshop? Everybody I know complains about it constantly, and yet it's still the industry standard.

[vunderba]

There are plenty of successful alternatives to Photoshop (Affinity, Pixelmator, Krita, etc). The issue as always is vendor lock-in - when everyone you're doing business with is expecting to be able to collaborate using Adobe then it becomes a huge pain point.

[thayne]

Because Adobe photoshop is what people are tought how to use. It is the same thing with excel. It isn't enough to have a superior product, you also have to overcome the momentum of the prevailing software. That's not to say it is impossible, but Photoshop has a significant advantage.

[SideQuark]

Photoshop isn’t on top simply because people know how to use it. There’s simply no better tool for most users who need that level of photo editing tool.

I’ve never seen a superior product to either Photoshop or Excel. Have you? Maybe they’re on top because they really are good products.

[sys_64738]

I find Excel a clunky piece of junk so use Apple Numbers for my spreadsheet needs. The majority of people probably don't need to pay the M$ or Adobe monthly tax.

[neverartful]

To be fair, you have to pay the Apple tax to use Apple Numbers. It's not monthly (or even a subscription), but it's not a one-time payment if you want the ability to use it over a long period of time.

[maeil]

Once in >5 years is nothing like a SaaS, especially since it's such a tiny part of a product. Even with the traditional software there'd be no guarantee it would keep working for longer than that, e.g. on new OS versions, especially with more specialized software which is a lot of the market for such things.

[herbst]

Googles spreadsheet is much more performant, useable and shareable for me. I also never got warm with excel weird and heavily limited language, no matter how much I tried to.

For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.

[SideQuark]

Sheets lags at 1000 rows. Excel allows 1 million. Excel has incredible optimization capabilities, it's numerics are vastly faster (and more accurate, thanks to Javascript being terrible for accurate math). While Javascript (sheets) is decently performant, it's no match for C++ and hand tuned assembly making Excel work. I tried but cannot find a single performance benchmark where Sheets outperforms Excel.

And the first time you need sheets to interact with any of the zillion excel spreadsheets running on the planet (all of finance and pretty much all of corporate America) and it fails and it costs you a contract, you'll switch immediately.

I'm guessing you really don't push either much at all.

Despite Sheets having a free version for almost 20 years, Excel sales are at all time highs. Go figure.

[herbst]

Sure I am not a power user. I doubt most people are :) I never found a CSV and instantly thought "oh wow let's put that in excel" I usually would just write a random script to get the data I want the way I want it.

Edit:// I am not sure if increased sales means anything when they switched their license model so often and aggressive

[SideQuark]

Most people aren't power users of Photoshop either, but no other program comes close to being able to do what it does, which is why it's the tool of choice for the vast majority of professionals that edit photos. The same thing goes for Excel. Your anecdata of being an amateur doesn't provide evidence that Excel is not a superior product, any more than a claim MSPaint is better than Photoshop because all you do is draw circles.

If all you do is CSV things then you're not even a basic user of either. The power isn't a viewer for a table of data.

As to increased sales, I find it amusing where there's good evidence for a thing being true, and people not wanting it to be true make up the most fringe excuses. The fact is sales are up by a lot. If you're going to make handwave claims, demonstrate a fact that your excuse is an actual fact, not a wishful claim to save face. If anything, as the world does more and more data analysis, Excel is one of the most used tools, because it's good for that, so it also makes sense there is more, not less, demand for Excel. And if the license model pissed enough off there a completely free "alternative". Why don't they all jump ship if it's usable?

Occam's razor :)

I just did a search on indeed.com to see job listings with "microsoft excel", 500,000 hits. I did the same search with "google sheets", zero hits. Ouch.

[GoblinSlayer]

I know mspaint better, it starts faster too.

[sneak]

Pixelmator was a wildly successful Photoshop competitor.

Their company was successful too; Apple recently purchased them.

The speculation is that Apple will now compete with Adobe’s subscriptionware.

[trimethylpurine]

Gimp works great. The worst thing about it is the lack of high end YouTube video tutorials. That's what you're really paying for with Adobe, I think.

[araes]

Having used Gimp and Photoshop fairly extensively, I'd agree that Gimp works, and it has the features that Photoshop has (for the most part). However, there's quite a bit of user interface issues with Gimp that make somewhat simplistic activities rather irritating.

Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on almost every process, and the interface makes you feel like you need to, because they're all exposed immediately.

Photoshop (personal opinion) is better about having an initially functional feature, with relatively "what you expect" defaults, and then layers of fiddly knobs you can tweak if you "really" want to or need to for a project.

[herbst]

Every time I've used Photoshop the whole UI/UX changed. Buttons are moving around, getting renamed. Some functions are hidden in submenus of submenus, etc.

IMO Photoshop is just simpler because people are usually used to it. In reality Gimp always had a much more reliable UI

[irrational]

I have all the keyboard shortcuts for photoshop in my muscle memory. Those same keyboard shortcuts don't work in, say, Gimp.