[nwh]

The trouble is that the lock-in is immense. I know people with upwards of 20,000 PSD files in stock ready for when clients return and want similar jobs done. Every piece of print hardware I know of uses Pantone standard colours which no other software supports properly or fully. None of the plotters I have used support anything but Photoshop and Illustrator through Adobe Flash plugins. For all the cries that Sketch and Pixelmator replace Illustrator and Photoshop.. they just don't on the professional level.

Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.

[abalone]

You make a good point about high-end print production, but Sketch is definitely making inroads with professional designers. They don't have to worry about plotter compatibility.

[nwh]

When someone comes through the door and gives me anything but an illustrator file with the proper layers set up, they're going to get charged for someone to sit and weed them out of whatever format Sketch generates.

[keithpeter]

There was a printers close to where I'm typing this that would only accept Quark Xpress files for production.

That was fine for years. Now it is a car park.