Imagine one of those corny political cartoons where there’s a huge fat politician squishing people and holding bags of money. That’s Adobe right now, and it sucks.
In my time I have used several different editing softwares when it came to creating video content. The very first one I ever used was in 5th or 6th grade when my family had an HP desktop. I wanted to make a video so I got my parents to download the free Windows editor which was Windows Vista Movie Maker. It was bad. It was incredibly bad. However, I didn’t know any better and it was a good-enough starting off point, so despite its flaws, I remember it fondly.
My current software of choice is Premiere Pro, by Adobe. I switched from Final Cut Pro X in my first year of university, and it was a glorious expansion. I loved the complex tools and functionality that the (admittedly sexier) flagship Apple software did not have to offer.
This led to a sudden learning curve which resulted in me diving into the incredibly powerful and effective Creative Cloud softwares. My primary tools were Premiere and Photoshop, though I began to spread out into After Effects, Lightroom, Audition and Media Encoder. The ecosystem is so tight-knit and intercommunicative, and with the student discount, the price I was paying was well worth it. It felt like I had sprouted additional metaphysical arms and legs dedicated to creative endeavors; I had never seen anything else like it.
That is the problem. There is nothing else like it.
An article published to Vice.com and written by Ernie Smith points out that politicians have made statements about breaking up tech giants, but usually are referring to a few key companies.
“But honestly, if we’re going to be talking about tech monopolies, I wish that Adobe was on [their] list.” -via Vice.com
By the official definition of Monopoly, it’s not immediately obvious that Adobe actually commands the kind of power to earn that title. They provide different software based on need, e.g. video editing, photo editing, audio production, etc.. And there certainly are alternatives to any one individual software, evidenced by my own path through multiple video editors. I don’t even use Audition as my primary music production DAW. So why is Adobe actually such a problem?
The Adobe Suite — a massive library of softwares covering a broad spectrum of creative branches, all available with a simple monthly subscription for limitless access, all with interconnected functionality — is one of the greatest tools available as a single unit. Adobe is so big that it was able to conquer the market of almost all branches of media and then sell it to consumers at a gut-wrenching 52 dollars per month before tax.
Perhaps you thought “Oh well I only need Premiere and Photoshop to do my work,” well, each software comes out to just over twenty dollars per month. Those two alone will cost over 45 dollars after tax, and at that point, it actually makes more sense to get the full creative cloud. At least then you don’t find yourself stuck because you just need to animate a graphic a little bit but need After Effects to do it.
In addition to ridiculous, out-of-pocket prices, without any natural predators, the software giant has no outside pressure to adjust functionality when it does not want to. All of the softwares receive relatively regular updates, bringing new functionality and tools with each rollout, but Adobe digs its heels in regularly, and faces little to no repercussion.
When Apple made a switch to Intel processors in 2006, Adobe meandered in their efforts to make their softwares compatible, overshooting their original expected date by nearly a full year.
More recently — On January 1, 2021 — Adobe officially discontinued Flash, a defining software of the early years of the internet. Programs, games, animations and more operated using Flash as its enabling plugin, and when security concerns and technology advancement lead to dwindling support for Flash in recent years, Adobe axed it, leading to the loss of tons of original internet content already on its last legs.
This, amidst a wide of other functionality issues Adobe refuses to confront and insane pricing leads us to a question:
Can anyone play the David to this creative suite Goliath?
As previously mentioned: There are competitors to the individual software options available. Photoshop competitors include GIMP, an open source, free alternative, as well as Affinity Photo, a more advanced but cheaper option, sitting at $49.99 (on sale as of this writing for $24.99).
Audition has Logic Pro X, Fruity Loops Studio, Pro Tools, and more to compete with.
So there’s no lack of competitors for individual softwares, but the suite Adobe offers is more than the sum of its parts, which makes it the most powerful of them all. I could be editing in Premiere, open audition and in 30 seconds have a piece of audio cleaned up and automatically inserted back into my video project without any exporting/bouncing/normalizing/re-importing tasks in the way. The time and headaches it saves is incredible. What I save on Tylenol may make up the difference for the eye-watering price of this absolutely irreplaceable suite of powerful tools, but that doesn’t make it okay.
With any luck, another tech oligarch will step in and try to muscle its way into some of the creative industry market share. While it would be nice if it weren’t an oligarch, it doesn’t appear the market has much choice. The vast recourses necessary to be able to make good software for all branches of creative industries is hard to come by for indie and open-source developers.
So should you shell out for the suite?
The student discount currently makes the price of admission worth it for me. Maybe you can split an account with someone and share the two active licenses at a time (shh, don’t tell Adobe). There are workarounds, but they’re not always pretty. Until something better comes along, I’ll have to stick with Adobe. But the moment an alternate suite hits the market, I’ll be sure to give it the best chance I can offer.