[ptero]

This. I heard "gimp is free and will kill Adobe within a year or two" from 1997 or so. As much as I hate Adobe's methods it still wins hands down in UX for image editing. So, as a hobbyist, I have no plans to cancel my subscription.

I wish for some real competition in this space, but it will take a LOT of effort to dethrone Adobe. My 2c.

[echelon]

Gimp is an awful app with terrible UX.

Adobe has RunwayML, Midjourney, and a hundred other startups chasing after them.

The number of things you can do without Adobe is increasing every day.

[ptero]

> Gimp is an awful app with terrible UX.

Yes, and it's not clear that those startups will fare better than gimp.

Adobe spends inordinate amount of effort to understand the problems that users are solving and make UX that users love. As the result Adobe has tons of money to improve the product. Users curse its business practices, white an occasional "goodbye Adobe" or "FU" messages but keep buying subscriptions.

The moat around this should not be underestimated. My 2c.

[echelon]

There is no love for Adobe. Those subscriptions are begrudgingly held.

The new breed of tools can already do your Adobe workflow. There simply is nothing for Adobe to add to the table.

Adobe had a huge moat for image and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. Now it's easy for anyone to models up to a new UX and deliver 90% of the useful surface area of Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy. That's not how editing of the future will work.

Besides, the number of creators is going to increase by at least an order of magnitude, if not more. Those creators are growing up on new tools. Adobe is stuffy. Someone using CapCut is never going to download Adobe Creative Cloud.

This game is already lost.

[ptero]

> Adobe had a huge moat forimage and video tools because they were historically very hard to develop. ... Adobe's labyrinth of menus is legacy.

I am not sure. I heard the same arguments from the gimp crowd for years. But they always kept talking about solving their own problems (programmatic changing of imagery for web development), not the problems creative, non programmer users had and were willing to pay for solving (interactive manipulation based on visual feedback, which is how many creative types tend to work). They vehemently opposed improvements that were critical for hobbyists and professionals, like insisting on staying with 8-bit colors forever.

As a result, 25+ years later, gimp is a niche tools with its main draw being that it is free. Adobe spent a lot of time understanding workflows of target users.

When I, a pure hobbyist, work on my photos in Photoshop my feeling is immediately "ah, it really does what I want". As much as I hate Adobe business practices I gladly pay their subscription ransom to have Photoshop when I process my travel pictures.

I am not sure the new crowd understands paying users (and not "I will use it for free and watch ads" folks) any better than gimp used to. But I wish them luck. My 2c.