Adobe pioneered the software subscription dystopia we live in and now they will pioneer the lack of engagement account inactivation dystopia that is coming.
This isn’t uncommon in business. Banks have done “shut down inactive accounts” with low balances for as long as I know (I’ve had a couple of accounts shut down). Uber also dropped my account since I never used them after learning of their history. More than no ride activity, I’m guessing the fact the only card I had on my account was no longer valid. So it’s not like Adobe is inventing something here.
Autodesk predates Adobe's SaaS model by several years; Creative Suite was still a disk-in-a-box offering while AutoCAD started upfront + required annual subscription-only for new seats around 2008.
Dropbox has been in the news here several times over the past year for account inactivation, but that's hardly new.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is I highly doubt Adobe will pioneer anything - good or bad.
High-end 3D software of the 80s and 90s, Softimage, Wavefront, Alias, etc., all required annual “support” payments and often in the many thousands of dollars. We called it digital ransom. Oh, and SGI had some pretty outlandish annual payment requirements as well.
To be fair, the "support" payments for these systems started at the beginning; in the late 50's / early 60's. But it wasn't considered "Subscription Software". AutoCAD was considered on of the first to make the transition away from box sales and they definitely lowered the purchase prices (vs annual subscription) to make adoption easier.
For visual design, I can see the value; a lot of people say Affinity is pretty great. The bummer for me is that there remains no great alternative for video. FCPX Resolve, by itself, is good to great, and Resolve's CG package, Fusion, is okay (don't love the editing model), but there isn't the kind of tight integration between components that makes bouncing between tools pleasant to use. Throwing a PSD into an AE composition and having a text-templated instance of the AE comp within a Premiere timeline is something I just never think about, while having to manually go bake intermediaries drives me up the wall.
This week I tried to make a go of switching from Premiere to Resolve for real(tm), and I lasted like...two hours. Finding myself saying "but where are the buttons?" was maybe the first time I have felt truly old trying to use a computer. Adobe can have my $30/mo forever, I guess.
> Anyone looking to jump ship, the Affinity suite is very close to Illustrator, Publisher, and Photoshop in capability.
Last I checked, Affinity didn't support Photoshop's XMP sidecar files because {excuses}. That's a deal-breaker for lots of RAW photographers with existing files they care about.
Wouldn’t {excuses} be reverse engineering all of Lightroom’s adjustment tools to be able to develop the same picture from a given pair of raw and sidecar files?
It will take these customers some time to understand that their deeper problem is not the lack of support for XMP but decades-long vendor lock-in they voluntarily entered into. Only with this understanding they can realize it's worth the effort.
Let's reformulate the problem: what is a more responsible approach regarding old graphics files that have value for you: to keep them in a proprietary format that can be used only with a tool you will have to pay for until the end of your life and can lose access to at any moment[0] because it's controlled by a third party, or rather store them in a format that is open or can be opened by software you actually own and which cannot be shut down by someone else?
Yes, I know we had little choice back then. But we are in a better position now.
The risk detailed in the link you posted is regarding online storage. Notice it's talking about downloading files stored with Adobe. That's a very real risk, and I never advocated storing stuff online.
However, if Adobe really canceled everyone's subscriptions tomorrow, people would immediately mess with Photoshop enough to at least export their files to some other formats, if not outright keep using it. There isn't a genuine risk of "can lose access to at any moment" here.
However, I'll also note that the risk profiles are obviously different for different situations. An individual photographer that takes pictures of their family or nature is not going to be in the same boat as the employees of some company. Heck, if I was working for some big corporation that dealt with RAW files, I would probably immediately migrate to an open format for files moving forward. That doesn't imply the same thing makes sense for every individual. Same goes for corporate vs. individual backup schemes/security defenses/etc.
There was no real competition to the Adobe suite for decades. Pros didn't have a real choice.
The same pros didn't have a choice between Mac OS and Windows NT. The lack of accurate color calibration kept them on Mac OS, even with it's significantly inferior kernel process, and memory management.
It is their problem, just not immediate and not actionable. Things like this let Adobe continue their extortion while their software stagnates. For example PSD/PSB is a internal proprietary format for Photoshop, it was never intended to be the industry standard exchange format for raster images, but is abundantly used as such. Technically, users are not wrong in requiring impeccable PSD compatibility from other software and can call actual reasons {excuses}, but realistically it's not possible. Then how do they expect anything to change?
> users are not wrong in requiring impeccable PSD compatibility from other software and can call actual reasons {excuses}, but realistically it's not possible. Then how do they expect anything to change?
First, "realistically it's not possible" isn't obviously true on its face. People have accomplished incredible feats of reverse engineering (arguably much harder ones) even in the open-source world - with hardly any compensation. It takes a ton of talent, investment, and dedication, sure. It's hard. But it's not like this is out of humanity's reach or something.
Second, "realistically it's not possible" applies just as well for the flip side. Expecting customers to ignore their very real and actual problems and pay for a non-solution just because HNers prefer them to (calling them "sunk costs" or whatever, as you can see in sibling threads), is realistically not possible either. It's just ignoring reality.
Finally, customers (at least retail ones) aren't investors or policymakers - they're just customers. You can't burden them with problems in the hope of guilt-tripping them into "but society would be so much better in the coming decades if you ignored your problems". That hasn't even worked for something with consequences as severe as climate change, let alone Adobe's vendor lock-in on Photoshop.
I am both a "customer" and a developer (and a manager making pipeline decisions in a creative company, in the past). The problem with reverse engineering is that it's a minefield for the business entity, from all viewpoints - competition, legal, tech. And it's never complete. Large reverse engineering attempts usually end up in a disaster for a business, and suggesting everybody following another company by reverse engineering is just not going to work. There's an objective reason for the poor compatibility with Adobe products, that's not an excuse.
As I said, you're not wrong - you'll just get stuck with exploitation by Adobe as a result, and the reason is not laziness or excuses by the developers of other software. RAW edits in the sidecars in particular simply can't be made compatible between different software, because everybody has their own magic and these files only keep the configuration data for it. The best you can count on is compatibility between the different versions of the same software, if the vendor provides it, and you will lose your edits when Adobe goes out of business or decides to cut some backward compatibility.
> The problem with reverse engineering is that it's a minefield for the business entity, from all viewpoints
I don't buy this; RE is a gross exaggeration of what's actually going on. They don't even need to go through the trouble of reverse-engineering for the most common XMP file functionalities people actually want. The XMP file is just a list of operations. It's right there in XML, already human-readable in English. The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights". Surely the app can at least alter brightness and contrast... just read the darn file and apply the straightforward stuff as if the user applied them manually! And if users re-adjust the settings, just update these back in the file like Photoshop would. If they see a random transformation they can't replicate adequately, they can just warn the user. It's not even hard to handle the easy pieces, let alone requiring reverse engineering! You won't get a bit-for-bit pixel-perfect repro, but who cares? It's not like they have to change the heart of that one random user who used XMP files to transform their penguin into a gorilla that they hashed on the blockchain to get the 90%+ of the other holdouts to jump ship!
Yes, it is a list of operations but making your photos look like they came out of Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom with the same edits is nearly impossible.
>The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights".
There's an entire iceberg under these words alone. What definition of exposure are they using? Which kind of math and curves to separate the highlights from other tonal zones? What's the color science behind their stuff? How do they approach things like perceptual uniformity? (ACR's colorspace axis are notoriously different from their typical definitions in color science). I'm not even starting on things that are always applied without you noticing, like the input curve or highlight recovery (which is surprisingly complex). It's also the thought process that needs to be reverse engineered, not the code itself. Without all that, you won't get nearly the same look, let alone identical.
Try diving into the source code of something like RawTherapee or darktable (coincidentally, the thought process behind the latter is thoroughly documented) to understand how complex this magic actually is. And then there's the question of patents, competition (you are always behind), and adversarial actions by Adobe. It's simply a non-starter for a business.
Believe me, I do understand reproducing the curves and all is complicated, but the point I'm trying to get across is that that's not the goal for most people. Most people literally couldn't look at a photo and tell you if the picture came out of Lightroom or something else. When they do +2 exposure and -50 highlights, they're not thinking "will my cousin be able to tell that this didn't come out of Lightroom". They're thinking "will my cousin be even able to see me in the shadow and see the clouds in the blue sky". Heck, if the difference ends up being so awful and noticeable that you can't stand it, you can at least tweak the settings from there. But at least the software tried to do some of the work for you to get you around the right ballpark! If nothing else, at least you can see which settings needed to be adjusted so you don't have to spend time rediscovering that part for every photo! You don't have to force every single user to start from scratch for every single picture.
I use ACDSee for RAW development and photo collection management. It uses XMP sidecar files, but I don’t know if it’s compatible with Photoshop. I suspect not (and I don’t care, I stay away from Adobe). I also accept that someday ACDSee may go bankrupt, my copy can bitrot etc, so I just export all my edits to 16-bit ProPhoto RGB TIFF, to have a high-quality lossless version for archival in addition to the low-quality 8-bit sRGB JPEGs I publish on the web.
Are you really exporting the edits in that case, or just the finished product after all the edits have been applied? Because the latter takes up a ton more space and doesn't let you tweak the edits in the future - you'd have to reapply all of them from the ground up.
The latter. Yes, it takes more space, but all photography software understands this format, unlike some special proprietary Adobe stuff that you're going to lose, when you lose access to Adobe software. Bitrot is inevitable, choose software which can survive it.
I also preserve the RAW and XMP files in case I'd like to reedit something (although in practice I never do that). But I don't put my trust in those in the long term as much as in the TIFFs.
While having support for Lightroom proprietary format and edits would be a nice way for existing photographers that are vendor locked into Adobes software it is a Herculean effort for very little real benefit. The photographers that were lulled into "live lossless edits" with (the free for ever beta of) Lightroom already made the choice to be hamstrung by and having their edit being locked into Adobes format. They should accept the loss and render exported versions of their edited images. It is a fact that XML sidecar edits are not portable or suitable for archiving.
Strangely I received this notification but when I go to login it says there's no account with that email. In general it seems like this account expiration process is kind of sloppy.
It definitely doesn't make sense to expire accounts in use by desktop software where the user doesn't login to the website.
When I've seen companies do sloppy stuff like this in the past it's because some employee manually queried for accounts but their SQL query was missing a bunch of cases.
I have Affinity Publisher (InDesign) and Affinity Designer (Illustrator). One-time purchase, no account required, just a license key is needed.
It more that suits my needs, but it has a clear ceiling. This is a prosumer app, and works fine for those needs. If your workflow requires Adobe-only features, then obviously it won't be the right fit.
I got this email and I went to sign in and my account is gone even though the email said I have 90 days. I guess they deleted everything and all my Behance data as well.
To your point, not every small bump in life needs to be a blog post.
This certainly falls under first world problems. A small annoyance, like spilling coffee in the morning. And the author spilling coffee on himself is just something I can't get outraged behind.
This is big brain vendor lock strategy. They'll delete your account, but keep your billing active. Can't easily cancel your subscription when your account no longer works. And when you call they can be like, "Sorry, we can't find that account."
46 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadDropbox has been in the news here several times over the past year for account inactivation, but that's hardly new.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is I highly doubt Adobe will pioneer anything - good or bad.
hn@ycombinator.com
It's also a lot nicer to use in many ways. For example, using Export Persona in Designer is soo much better than Adobe, I'd regret moving back.
Best part is that for less than the cost of two months renting Adobe, you own the entire suite.
Not affiliated whatsoever; I just despise Adobe's business practices.
This week I tried to make a go of switching from Premiere to Resolve for real(tm), and I lasted like...two hours. Finding myself saying "but where are the buttons?" was maybe the first time I have felt truly old trying to use a computer. Adobe can have my $30/mo forever, I guess.
Affinity mentions it takes $500k to develop a Linux version and their market research says they will never recoup that.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
For version 2 of Affinity Photo:
> It looks like someone got the program working. Unfortunately, it requires some work.
https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=37300
Last I checked, Affinity didn't support Photoshop's XMP sidecar files because {excuses}. That's a deal-breaker for lots of RAW photographers with existing files they care about.
Yes, I know we had little choice back then. But we are in a better position now.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49973337
The risk detailed in the link you posted is regarding online storage. Notice it's talking about downloading files stored with Adobe. That's a very real risk, and I never advocated storing stuff online.
However, if Adobe really canceled everyone's subscriptions tomorrow, people would immediately mess with Photoshop enough to at least export their files to some other formats, if not outright keep using it. There isn't a genuine risk of "can lose access to at any moment" here.
However, I'll also note that the risk profiles are obviously different for different situations. An individual photographer that takes pictures of their family or nature is not going to be in the same boat as the employees of some company. Heck, if I was working for some big corporation that dealt with RAW files, I would probably immediately migrate to an open format for files moving forward. That doesn't imply the same thing makes sense for every individual. Same goes for corporate vs. individual backup schemes/security defenses/etc.
The same pros didn't have a choice between Mac OS and Windows NT. The lack of accurate color calibration kept them on Mac OS, even with it's significantly inferior kernel process, and memory management.
First, "realistically it's not possible" isn't obviously true on its face. People have accomplished incredible feats of reverse engineering (arguably much harder ones) even in the open-source world - with hardly any compensation. It takes a ton of talent, investment, and dedication, sure. It's hard. But it's not like this is out of humanity's reach or something.
Second, "realistically it's not possible" applies just as well for the flip side. Expecting customers to ignore their very real and actual problems and pay for a non-solution just because HNers prefer them to (calling them "sunk costs" or whatever, as you can see in sibling threads), is realistically not possible either. It's just ignoring reality.
Finally, customers (at least retail ones) aren't investors or policymakers - they're just customers. You can't burden them with problems in the hope of guilt-tripping them into "but society would be so much better in the coming decades if you ignored your problems". That hasn't even worked for something with consequences as severe as climate change, let alone Adobe's vendor lock-in on Photoshop.
As I said, you're not wrong - you'll just get stuck with exploitation by Adobe as a result, and the reason is not laziness or excuses by the developers of other software. RAW edits in the sidecars in particular simply can't be made compatible between different software, because everybody has their own magic and these files only keep the configuration data for it. The best you can count on is compatibility between the different versions of the same software, if the vendor provides it, and you will lose your edits when Adobe goes out of business or decides to cut some backward compatibility.
Nothing ever is. But it doesn't need to be.
> The problem with reverse engineering is that it's a minefield for the business entity, from all viewpoints
I don't buy this; RE is a gross exaggeration of what's actually going on. They don't even need to go through the trouble of reverse-engineering for the most common XMP file functionalities people actually want. The XMP file is just a list of operations. It's right there in XML, already human-readable in English. The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights". Surely the app can at least alter brightness and contrast... just read the darn file and apply the straightforward stuff as if the user applied them manually! And if users re-adjust the settings, just update these back in the file like Photoshop would. If they see a random transformation they can't replicate adequately, they can just warn the user. It's not even hard to handle the easy pieces, let alone requiring reverse engineering! You won't get a bit-for-bit pixel-perfect repro, but who cares? It's not like they have to change the heart of that one random user who used XMP files to transform their penguin into a gorilla that they hashed on the blockchain to get the 90%+ of the other holdouts to jump ship!
>The cases most people care about are astonishingly simple. Like "+25 contrast", "+2 exposure", "-50 highlights".
There's an entire iceberg under these words alone. What definition of exposure are they using? Which kind of math and curves to separate the highlights from other tonal zones? What's the color science behind their stuff? How do they approach things like perceptual uniformity? (ACR's colorspace axis are notoriously different from their typical definitions in color science). I'm not even starting on things that are always applied without you noticing, like the input curve or highlight recovery (which is surprisingly complex). It's also the thought process that needs to be reverse engineered, not the code itself. Without all that, you won't get nearly the same look, let alone identical.
Try diving into the source code of something like RawTherapee or darktable (coincidentally, the thought process behind the latter is thoroughly documented) to understand how complex this magic actually is. And then there's the question of patents, competition (you are always behind), and adversarial actions by Adobe. It's simply a non-starter for a business.
I also preserve the RAW and XMP files in case I'd like to reedit something (although in practice I never do that). But I don't put my trust in those in the long term as much as in the TIFFs.
It definitely doesn't make sense to expire accounts in use by desktop software where the user doesn't login to the website.
When I've seen companies do sloppy stuff like this in the past it's because some employee manually queried for accounts but their SQL query was missing a bunch of cases.
It more that suits my needs, but it has a clear ceiling. This is a prosumer app, and works fine for those needs. If your workflow requires Adobe-only features, then obviously it won't be the right fit.
Get in touch with Adobe support to file a bug or something? I get mistaken e-mails from companies all the time, but not one of them is HN-worthy.
This certainly falls under first world problems. A small annoyance, like spilling coffee in the morning. And the author spilling coffee on himself is just something I can't get outraged behind.