In the midst of what seems to be tech companies competing to see which one can piss off their current and potential customers the quickest, Adobe’s entry into the competition seems almost tailor-made to ensure that anyone that still occasionally thinks when purchasing software doesn’t just walk but run as fast and as far away as possible from their products unless really forced to use them.
Okay sure, Recall was a bad idea. One that was hilariously shrouded in the security that this and the actually amazing new Snapdragon chips powering Copilot PC’s would finally show the MacBook Air and all of its acolytes that there’s another way. Instead, it mostly made IT managers everywhere start thinking how to approach their equipment partners to ensure that they would never, ever be sold a computer with Copilot on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwIXWtrc
Speaking of Apple, their crush ad now almost seems tame. Like the sort of thing that they wouldn’t need to apologize for except for the fact that they have spent quite a lot of their 2024 eroding any goodwill they got from all of the amazing hardware they’ve pumped out lately.
Adobe has spent far longer between token goodwill efforts for their customers. Off the top of my head, I’m unable to remember any certainly since their decision to become fully SAAS in 2012. So naturally when the news that their new terms of service were the digital equivalent of Prima Nocta with your content, the reactions didn’t take long to make themselves loudly known. Not helping matters was their later apology, where we got to see a couple of executives desperately trying to stop the internet with their hands. It’s wonderful for us that have gotten used to companies trying to do business by FAFO; crucially, I think it will prove to be quite an interesting test.
In a world where more and more people are getting sick with corporate pandering, out–of–touch communications, and the overall enshittification of products and services, it’s very easy to get outraged at a corporation. It’s much harder to commit to switching to switch from the products/services of that corporation into something else. Sometimes it’s fair enough, they may be quite difficult, if not impossible, to completely sever ties from them. But in the case of Adobe, their general approach to business and the seeming contempt they have for the people that they ask money from on a monthly basis has caused an entire ecosystem of Adobe alternatives. An ecosystem that they seem to have done little to address, secure in their belief that nobody ever got fired from renting Adobe.
But that just means that the alternatives are getting better and better. The key example of this being Affinity, which I’m rooting for as much as anyone who loves rooting for the underdog can. Their recent acquisition by Canva hasn’t had ill effects so far and they seem to always be on the lookout for Adobe announcements to heavily discount their Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign alternatives. Premiere Pro users have Davinci Resolve for their alternative. Very robust and free. The one area of concern is PDF’s, which remain as esoteric as eer and a pain in the neck to edit directly.
With these latest ToS changes, Adobe seems to have accidentally created a test to see how much more can their customers take. I really hope that the response is somewhere along the lines of “Nowhere near as much as you think.”
