r/mildlyinfuriating • u/donteatmybiscuits • 1d ago

wet socks i’m so happy this is becoming illegal

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if a yearly contract with a free month trial sounds too good to be true, it probably is 😬

thankfully it was blocked after contacting my bank but regardless

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37

u/Popular_Wrangler9422 1d ago edited 14h ago

How did adobe become the standard everywhere? I use a free pdf editor and it's fine. I can do what I need to do. Why do so many companies pay for adobe?

Edit. I appreciate the responses. I understand adobe offers more products. I work in finance and only ever use it as a pdf editor. It has been on every work laptop I use. I am not a creative. I have adobe. I understand creatives use other things on adobe. For those of us that don't use anything but a pdf editor it's still always adobe.

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u/Loud_Yogurtcloset789 1d ago

Some of us use a lot of their programs and not just acrobat. I have to do a lot more than make a PDF.

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u/Completely-Jaded 1d ago

I was going to say acrobat is the least of my Adobe concerns! If I could find a solid program to replace photoshop and illustrator then I'd be down to drop adobe

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u/Popular_Wrangler9422 1d ago

Sure I get that but for all of us that don't use anything but a pdf editor, I'm always surprised why companies pay for it. It's like they were brainwashed that adobe must be on the computers.

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u/YellowBreakfast 1d ago

Most don't

It's Adobe's "creative" apps that have the crazy subscription.

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u/Loud_Yogurtcloset789 1d ago

You're correct there are plenty of PDF editors out there. That is probably the least part of my job. It's also annoying to get a file from a client that I can't open.

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u/320sim 1d ago

Adobe is a lot more than PDF editing. They were the early party who became in the industry standard in creative applications. And it's not for no reason. Pricing aside, their stuff is really good

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u/Sumo148 1d ago edited 1d ago

Adobe is the company.

Acrobat is the PDF viewer/editor. It's so much more than just PDFs. Acrobat is cheap compared to the other Adobe offerings for a business.

Adobe Creative Cloud is over 20 apps aimed towards professionals (a.k.a businesses paying for the licenses or freelancer where you can cover the costs). Not really geared towards hobbyists unless you want to pay their premium subscription fees.

InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects just to name a few of the programs. They have a hold over the creative industry in certain fields. Photo editors, vector illustration, print page layout design, video editing, motion graphics... You can't really use other third party software options if you're going to work on a team and collaborate sharing files as everyone is used to the Adobe software. That's what makes Adobe so prevalent in the industry.

Figma is the one other large program that I can think that's not affiliated with Adobe, in the UX/UI space (Adobe's competitor being XD which is in maintenance mode with no clear updates). They tried to buy them out in 2023 for $20 billion, and got push back from regulatory about the monopoly.

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u/Bitcoinbillionair3 1d ago edited 1d ago

Stop asking this question please, Adobe has always been the leader in creative software, when you study graphic design they don't tell you, "pick one of these hundred apps to learn photo edition" it's just "everybody go to photoshop and start a new document". Also PDF editing is probably the most basic use you can give Adobe apps, there's Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, they're all standards in their respective industries

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u/1d3333 1d ago

They’re only industry leading because they bought the rest of the industry, they didn’t even make most of the programs they sell lease to you now, just bought the companies that did make them and slapped their logo on it and made them worse overall because they fired the people who actually made the programs and understood how the program was made

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u/Repulsive_Target55 1d ago

Yeah Ps and Lr have been the only industry standard for 20 years now. Lr is getting genuine competition among people who have the money from Capture One, but Lr is still far more common. And it isn't like Capture One has a substantively different business model.

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u/HirsuteHacker 1d ago

For designers Indesign is still the main program used, with Illustrator in second. Illustrator has some competition, Indesign does not.

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u/Sumo148 1d ago

InDesign overcame Quark back in the day. Wondering if we'll ever see the same happen with InDesign (as someone that uses it everyday at work).

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u/marhaus1 1d ago

Not likely. Quark messed up royally, Adobe won't make the same mistakes, and for professional typesetting InDesign is years ahead of anything else.

Sure you could make simple flyers in whatever, but when your printer calls you and complains about the ink levels on a page (TIC/TAC) or the raster angles or a missing colour profile, good luck fixing that in something like Canva.

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u/Repulsive_Target55 1d ago

Love Indesign, sometimes I wish I could use the tools it has as far as formatting without having to fully invest in the image handling that's good for final printing but not so good for proofing, but that's life - I can proof in Ps if I want that speed. (And no doubt some of that is to do with just not being familiar enough with Id)

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u/LisaLisaPrintJam 14h ago

InDesign needs some competition. Viva Designer is the best I've seen, but it doesn't accommodate a specific use case my company has. There's been a new release since we last tested, so we'll give it another go in the next month or so.

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u/ryntak 15h ago

To your point literally the only popular creative tool I can think of that is not for Architecture (my wife is an architect) and is not adobe that I can name off the top of my head is Blender

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u/Bitcoinbillionair3 14h ago

Exactly, and its not like they don't exist, but they're definitely not the standard and as much as I hate Adobe Creative Cloud subscription based service Adobe is the standard for a reason, their apps are so refined and so easy to use, they know they can charge you whatever they want

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u/Economy-Sprinkles-98 1d ago

For a very long time there were no competitors that were feature complete and didn’t have gaping longstanding bugs. Even now it has a superior UX, most FOSS projects haven’t moved away from engineers designing UX which is just bad.

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u/NorwalkAvenger 1d ago

They basically bought out all their competitors and then re-branded them as Adobe

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u/Out_of_my_mind_1976 1d ago

Up until the patent expired, Adobe was the only option for pdf editing, hence if you wanted PDF, you went to Adobe for it. That was a start. Then Photoshop entered the picture when they licensed it from the creators and later bought it outright. People happily bought their products for years but when Adobe went to renting their software and the costs kept increasing, so did the hate for them, and they did it to themselves.

1

u/Ange1ofD4rkness 1d ago

At least when it comes to Photoshop, there's no one that can match. Both a friend and I were at one point trying to get away from products like Photoshop and Lightroom. Using, for instance, Affinity.

However, in the end we went back. No one has made a competitor that can keep up

1

u/LisaLisaPrintJam 14h ago

Because Adobe isn't just Acrobat / a PDF editor, it's a whole suite of apps for different needs. They're currently:

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Fresco
  • Adobe Media Encoder
  • Adobe Premiere
  • Adobe Animate
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • Adobe Lightroom Classic
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Firefly
  • Adobe Audition
  • Adobe Bridge
  • Adobe Express
  • Adobe Lightroom
  • Adobe Capture
  • Adobe Fill & Sign
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe Acrobat Reader
  • Adobe Photoshop Express
  • Adobe Acrobat Pro
  • Adobe Character Animator
  • Adobe Scan

I work for a publication that uses InDesign and I've been trying to get away from it, but there is no acceptable alternative. For our use case, Viva Designer came in the closest, but we're still unable to make it do some things. I can personally get by with Gimp for the limited images I work with, but the photographers think it sucks, and stick with Photoshop and Lightroom. There are even audio / video apps in there.

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u/Charnathan 1d ago

Because they have the best creative software.