Adobe is stretching the limit of what is acceptable to me and other pros. If they gop on, I will look for alternatives to their software sooner rather than later.
One thing is the pricing model. You can no longer buy a license, you have to pay monthly “or else”. Thus costing you many, many times what a license used to cost. Over my dead body, Adobe. No way will I let usurious suits decide at any moment whether I am allowed to run my company. Forget it.
But there’s more. Adobe is doing almost zero development. Even bug fixes aren’t being done: When you try to export a slideshow, Adobe LR hangs if the slides include horizontal as well as vertical slides. Old bug, still not fixed. This is intolerable!
The speed also hasn’t improved. Again, intolerable.
So, another few nudges like this and Adobe, which is already a company I intensely dislike, will be a company I advise all my students to avoid.
In this, they are a metaphor for all US business, which thinks it is invulnerable. Apple is another example: $1400 for a cell phone? $600 for a Mac Pro screen stand? Really, Apple?
Shaking my head.
I’ve always found Adobe’s other products (adobe reader, for example) to be very intrusive – i.e. trying to take over your preferences and make it the reader of choice, automatically checking for updates in the background and giving you no choice in the matter. Reminds me a lot of RealPlayer from back in the day, which I always considered to be one step away from being a virus. And where is RealPlayer now?
Hi Michael, I liked this post. I felt the same about adobe and decided to switch from Indesign to Sketch for my design work and from Lightroom I switched to Capture One. Having used the amazing Software Bibble years ago, I now see myself enjoying processing my images again. For the workflow, the capture one settings will be saved in a folder next to the raw images, which I prefer to the XMP spamming by lightroom. And it’s super fast with GPU!! They have a free trial, and import lightroom settings/ratings. It’s funny, as a graphic designer I worked almost exclusivly with Adobe products, so I am happy I could get away from their licensing models, at least for raw processing. Cheers,
I’m so frustrated with Adobe. I really like their products. I have LR5 and Photoshop CS6. I’ve been using PS a lot lately for old photo restoration projects and I’m really miffed at Adobe for trying to force everybody to this pay-for-life model. It seems to be the way things are going these days. So one has to ask, who’s at fault here – Adobe for trying this scam, or the obvious large number of people and companies who are buying this and thereby supporting this scam. If people would, to use my favourite Nancy Reagan catch phrase, “just say no”, then Adobe would seemingly be forced to go back to the pay-once model. Unfortunately, my experience has been that many people are totally addicted to whatever is the latest thing that they don’t even stop to think what that means.
Kris, thanks for the tips on the other software. I’ll check them out.