[PhantomGremlin]

One would hope that you're correct. And in the very long run you will be. But IMO not anytime soon.

True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.

However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.

What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:

   Adobe is led by a bunch of dickheads who are
   alienating their customers. We think there's an
   opportunity for a more enlightened competitor
   to take market share.

Nobody will fund that. Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads. And then what happens to the startup's business plan?

Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!

[SoftwareMaven]

This is a classic innovator's dilemma. The competitor won't compete evenly with Adobe, they will start with an under served market. Adobe will scoff at them even being a threat. Sure, Adobe could stop being pricks any time, but that won't maximize profits, so they won't. Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.

And it may not be one company. It may be one for image editing, one for illustration, one for graphic design, and so on. There are really good tools out there today, but "everybody uses Adobe" so everybody uses adobe. Every one of these events (especially when Adobe costs your company money but refuses to provide any kind of remuneration) is one step closer to people saying "I'm going to learn something else".

[nova]

> Eventually, the competitor's product will become good enough, and the stampede away from Adobe will begin.

To prevent that is what patents are for.

[peterkelly]

> Especially since Adobe management could decide, overnight, to not be total dickheads

That's a big assumption there