Critiquing Adobe



I've recently run into several posts critiquing Adobe for their licensing practices as well as their product suites, which often consist of products with overlapping functionality wherein the products are inconsistent with each other in terms of the UX, thereby making it look more like a hodgepodge than a suite.

 For example, the Adobe Create Cloud (CC) suite reminds me of Bloomberg, the financial trading platform. The Bloomberg platform has multiple ways of doing the same trade (e.g. let's say you want to go an FX trade) and it can be impossible to figure out the pros/cons of each way of doing it and pick one way to do it. I know this because I worked in the wealth and asset management sector for a long time in a previous life.

In Adobe's case, this is the result of growing by way of acquisitions (as opposed to growing organically). Adobe's digital marketing suite, aka Marketing Cloud, is starting to suffer from similar issues, e.g. there are multiple ways to manage audiences (using AEM, Target, Analytics, Audience Manager) and even Adobe's own personnel often struggle to explain the pros/cons of each approach.

In the CC space, Adobe is facing competition from applications like Sketch (for creating web page mocks), DaVinciui Resolve (for video editing), Affinity Photo and Designer or Gimp (photo editing), Capture One (photo management), Figma (UI/UX design), Procreate (graphic design) Pexels or Unsplash (stock photos), TinyPNG (image optimization), uiGradients and Coolors (color palettes), Font Awesome and iconmonstr (icons), Undraw (illustrations).

In the digital marketing space, Adobe gets competition from Sitecore, Optimizely, Google, Evergage, and many others.

Despite all that, Adobe continues to produce amazing products with a rich feature set and manages to completely dominate the market. So, the downsides, albeit real, end up being mere annoyances.

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