The other day, Adobe decided to make their first post on their main account (which was created in December 2024) on Bluesky Social, and the resulting backlash ratio by artists and creators was so bad that they deleted the post (below). The hate was so strong that even IT folks threw back shade.
The company also made posts on a few other brand accounts (like their Photoshop one), but were equally met with derison (and similarly, the posts were deleted).
The negative reaction was well deserved for a number of reasons. The move to subscriptions (Creative Cloud back in 2011) has been a long running one. Sure, professional workflows can easily pay for an years subscription with one single job. The problem I have with subscription only licensing is that the customer is effectively “hostage” to this system. Furthermore (for non-professionals), it doesn’t make a lot of sense cost wise even if you qualify for some discount.
Earlier in 2024, Adobe’s Firefly (generative AI image generator) was found to be trained on Midjourney images. Midjourney is a competing AI image generator. Adobe made big claims about Firefly using an “ethical AI” model. Adobe later claimed this training represented only 5%; like that matters when it should be 0% if you are going to make bold claims about being clear of copyright theft.
Then last summer, Adobe also angered customers with a terms of use change with language that raised concerns about the companies ability to access, view, and analyze user generated content with AI tools. The backlash from that forced the company to respond with a clarification (and promise of speaking with key customers in order come up with a revision).
Most recently, the company caved to this whole executive order regarding DEI (diversity, equality, inclusion) by pulling back on the companies DEI hiring practices (the irony not being lost on many that the HR chief who made the call is a Chinese woman).
Basically, what was once the respectable company that set industry standards, has become this typical corporation releasing enshittified “as a service” subscription software, trying to ride this AI wave using any method to utilize existing works for training their models license free by doing it (and hoping no one will find out) and/or trying to bury this stuff somewhere in the terms of service/use, then caving to a government executive order (which is not even a law). This is a case of a company (and it’s social media staff not being able to properly “read the room”). The companies inability to come up with a proper PR response (by simply deleting the post) really does fall on Adobe executives head (executives who again, live and operate in their own reality).
If a lot of shops and contractors weren’t forced to use Adobe, the company would have a problem. Many of their products are now defacto standard due to cross platform compatibility and just sheer muscle memory. But there are a lot of alternatives (many of which are lower cost licenses). A user made this chart.
Myself, I’ve been using Pixelmator Pro in place of Photoshop (well, I occasionally use an old copy of Photoshop Creative Suite 6 on my old Mac Pro that is on High Sierra (just to be able to run some older versions)). I stopped using most of Adobe’s software for years now (but in the past, used Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere). I just do hobby (don’t give a crap) level stuff now and get by with Pixelmater Pro (recently acquired by Apple), iMovie/Final Cut Pro for video.
