Adobe’s Precarious State
After Affinity’s acquisition in 2024 by Canva, they have made a stunning decision to move to a free to use model. Affinity has now become a loss leader meant to attract perspective professionals into Canva’s ecosystem where the value is made in the backend through Canva pro. This also directly challenges adobes software subscription business model. With affinity designer now being free, I decided to give it a try and see how it would be. For raster-based artwork I still think photoshop comes out on top with its handling of the small things that add up that affinity designer lacks. For vector-based artwork I do see affinity being a viable alternative to adobe illustrator.
Under normal circumstances of the last decade, adobe would be able simply shrug it off as it was nothing and move on with their day. In an environment where inflation was subdued and interest rates were low, price was not a major pain point when the consumer had cash to throw around, but that era had passed. Now inflation has been running hot for the last few years, with wages being stagnant to add to the pain. The consumer now must choose between bare necessities or discretionary items. Though Adobes’ primary customer base consists of hobbyist, professionals, and large businesses, their line of work primarily provides products and services that would be seen as discretionary.
We have been in recession for some time; it’s just the government doesn’t want to admit it. Adobe being considered an industry standard is a good buffer against recession, but when the industry is getting decimated from the consumer being tapped out, anything can happen. Businesses that cannot maneuver themselves in this environment will simply go under. Adobe raising their prices in the face of it all only served to get people to really question if they need adobe or are there other alternatives that should be considered. When adobe wanted to raise their subscription price to 70$ a month for adobe cloud, I downgraded to photoshop. Then I found other software such as Rebelle 8 to be good for illustration, affinity designer for vector based artwork, and Da Vinci for video editing. Now the only thing I use photoshop for now is the utility it provides and creating pixel art. Of course their are some hiccups along the way and not everything is perfect, but that is the cold calculus that I have accepted.
Yet we see adobe continue to raise their subscription price for adobe cloud without skipping a beat. This could be explained by the fact that Adobe is a publicly traded company which has serious implications for the entity’s future. While Adobe can raise more money, adobe must cede more of its sovereignty to investors. When it comes to making long-term decisions that will shape the company’s future, adobe must now also factor in how this will benefit their shareholders and it shows with how the conduct themselves recently. Right now as of the time of me writing this AI is being advertised and if you do not invest in companies working towards this AI future then you are going to be left behind.
Adobe has decided that investing heavily into AI and integrating it into their software most likely to instill confidence with their shareholders. This has upset a portion of their customer base as they feel that adobe will try to use the work they made using adobe’s software to build an AI model that will compete against them. This sentiment is further reinforced when they hot water with their customers with their terms of service allowing them to train AI on whatever is stored in their cloud systems that they had to walk back. But all this research and development, as well as paying for the infrastructure to support this is not cheap, so the money has to come from somewhere. Meanwhile Canva; the privately owned company,sees that it is in their long-term interest to acquire Affinity as a way to introduce new people into the Canva ecosystem, with no mention of AI use.
What is most likely going to happen going forward is that more professionals will diversify. There won’t be a major dumping of Adobe’s software, but it will start trending down, then at the 11th hour when it is time to choose what path adobe should go down, they will double down on greed and appeasing shareholders which will push more people away. This process will continue until they become IBM, where they were once somebody, but then they became nobody.