JohnnyL’s Blogic

The catch is: open source apps will get better at an increasing velocity, and Adobe apps will keep moving "up the stack" by adding more features to target the most demanding creative pros, thus remaining competitive. However, the cost of this threatens the boundaries of price elasticity. When even _Academic_ pricing for the CS suite went up $200, it feels like Adobe jumped the shark for everyone other than corporate customers. I use and advocate increasing use of Adobe apps at work (daily newspaper), but find it hard to do the same in my private life at home. You start to lose non-profits, small business, and freelancers at the price points demanded when you add the many features. This is a classic innovators dilemma - really. I'm a fan of Adobe and a fan of free/open desktop graphics applications. Both will evolve, but I can't see Adobe doing well in entry level markets with current pricing strategy.

I am starting to think I should be using Open Source instead of Lightroom.. maybe it would crash less...

I'm not sure I understand the question, which is the title of this post. Am I to imply that one must choose innovation or integration, but not both?

Is there even a hypothesis that innovation can only occur in an opensource environment? I beg to differ.

Having worked at Adobe, I understand the challenges of integration literally millions of lines of code across multiple products, which for the most part, also crosses a variety of users (who naturally all want their software to do what THEY need). But at the same time, Adobe provides plenty of innovation in their products. In fact, John Warnock's brilliant move to start the internal ATG group is a big part of that. And trust me, no product manager on any team wants to see innovation fade in the face of integration. As long as the name Adobe appears on the product, you can be assured that there will always be industry-leading innovation. For example, the new color features in Illustrator -- a 20 year old product mind you -- is strong proof that Adobe continues to innovate. And Illustrator's new integration with Flash is also proof that you can have the best of both worlds -- products that offer best-of-class innovation and integration.

Bottom line is this -- no serious designer can fool themselves to think that they can replace Adobe's professional line of tools with OpenSource or Shareware Apps. Forget the pure functionality of it. There are too many factors that you cannot afford to overlook. Finding quality training on any Adobe product is easy. Finding freelancers who are familiar with Adobe software to help during busy seasons is a snap. Dealing with service providers and system integrators when it comes to publishing your content is a cinch when you're using industry-standard software.

Unless a designer lives on an island and never has to share a single asset with a client, colleague, or service provider, it would be a foolish business decision to use anything but Adobe's set of tools.

I'll close with a final thought: Opensource or similar apps might be able to deliver what a designer needs TODAY (with tinkering of course), but Adobe excels in delivering apps that cover just about every part of the creative process. Maybe I'm mainly a print person who is dabbling in web stuff. And maybe I think video is cool, but I just don't have clients asking for it yet. But if I own the Master Collection, I have the toolset to produce just about anything I might need -- be it for today's clients, or tomorrow's clients. Let me ask this -- in today's competitive environment, if a client would approach you and ask if you could deliver something, would you rather be able to bang it out, get it done, and make some money (and a happy client), or would you rather start trying to find an opensource solution which does what you now require, miss deadlines, lose money, reputation, and a good client?

Like it or not, there is simply no complete alternative for today's creative professional -- nothing compares to Adobe Creative Suite. Well, that's my opinion anyway.

Adobe better look up instead of down for who is a threat. Microsoft again is expanding its monopoly. Those in the open source do so for a variety of reasons. For some there is no way they will every have the money to afford Adobe professional products. Open source gives them an entry, a possibility. For others its being able to expand the functionality of the program via changing its code... This can mean an advantage over the whole field using the same canned application. So here we are, a grand old company with great technology: Adobe and a swarm of people who collectively write and use software: Open Source; both being attacked by a giant Monopoly: Microsoft. I suggest Adobe find how to become a member of open source and how to channel open sources energies and possibilities back into Adobe as an asset. Adobe should not want to fight Microsoft alone. I am not saying to give away your software. I am not saying to lower your software prices. But realize the platform called Windows is a closing field that eventially eats all who sell products for it. Increase your market. I am saying make all your software run on Linux. and do it well. Since your Mac stuff is working well, Linux will be easy. I wish you well.

I am glad to see Adobe moving into more applications. However, in order to allow them to be interacted with from a mobile device, Adobe needs to allow them to be interacted with via voice input, as referenced at www.UltimateMobileDevice.com

Have you considered porting CS3 to Linux? We're an IT training center with about 200 computers. We run Linux for our development courses as the tools exist (Eclipse, PHP, ...). But we can't do that those Adobe and AutoCAD courses as they have no Linux versions. If they did, we would be happy to pay more for the Linux versions as it would allow us to eliminate the Windows licensing fees.

I see a difference between tool sets (like CS3 - integrated products to build or work with existing data) and system (like Solaris). And I agree that that is strong value in CS3. While it doesn't lie in the Creative Products, would the Cold Fusion Server fall into the same group as Solaris?

The question is a classic open source issue: can the loss of paid purchase of the product (and the innovative development it drives) be offset by tools or services sales along with assistance from the community in product evolvement. Don't know (plus, my understanding is that CF Enterprise is costed and positioned against other high end server software, so it's not directly seen as a product that should be open).

So the argument goes like this: my time is money; so if Adobe can save me time with their product, their product is worth me buying.

Now for reasons best known to themselves, Adobe see fit to charge British customers the equivalent of $4,600 for CS3 Master Collection. That is $2,200 more than Americans pay, but I assume John Loiacono still feels we British can save money by buying his company's products, rather than using open source. So does he feel we British earn more per hour, or do we just take longer to do things when using open source solutions in his view?

It is important to think about it unideological. Markets demand open source solutions and in many parts of the industry it is pretty good for consumer confidence. Adobe's products don't have to be open source. Open standards are fine.

But of course many graphic professionals would like to use these programs on Linux or Unix plattforms. Because the fact is that most high performance computers run *nix derivates. It is pretty easy these days to set up a Linux cluster computer. For high end graphics and video production you really need more and cost-effective computer performance.

And graphic specialists know that GIMP etc. is no valid replacement for Photoshop. And of course its cool to work on Unix and it offers you nice advantages which are not needed for a consumer market but for professionals.

So rather than Adobe as Open Source I would advocate for Abobe on Open source solutions. Open source matters for platforms and APIs, not for applications.

Adobe's creative products are quite exceptional. They're this way because of a product focus that is quite difficult to achieve in "community" development efforts. Such products often suffer from "designed by committee" syndrome. It's hard to argue that products like CS or Apple's iLife and iWork do not greatly benefit from tight integration and extreme conformity in user interface (at least between components in the suites).

Now, while I'll give Adobe's "proprietariness" credit, I will also not buy the argument that this is an "either/or" choice. For example, when looking for batch processing solutions that I can incorporate into automation, I don't look for bloated UI-laden solutions. I go open source. A command-line utility with a few dozen options doesn't suffer if the "design committee" chooses to add twenty more. And as has been mentioned above, the development of this tool may be greatly accelerated beyond a company like Adobe's timeline.

As an example, Apple's actually doing a great job of supporting both the open and proprietary worlds. Where UI doesn't really matter, they tend to go open source (CUPS, Apache, Samba, WebKit, IMAP/POP, XMPP, etc.). But Apple would be foolish to provide the typical (worse) open source GUI interfaces. Instead, they provide the iApps, Safari, Mail, etc. and the results are exceptional.

So, there is room for all of this. Open source isn't always better. But it should always be considered, for the freedom it provides. Freedom + quality trumps any other argument. But freedom alone won't cut it.

Charles

I've done quite a bit of development work (a long time ago) on the Gimp, and I now work developing web applications where our graphic artist uses the Adobe suite. I also live just a few blocks from Adobe, perhaps giving me a unique perspective on all this. My own impression is that the Adobe suite has more bugs than the Gimp, but a better user interface even though it crashes more. We had to re-install XP and install the Adobe suite from scratch to get it working, and it still has issues (try making a custom border for a HTML table in illustrator, breaking into zones, and saving the pices to seperate .gif files over a network share). What it comes down to in the Photoshop vs. Gimp debate is user interface: the Gimp's user interface is different enough from Photoshop that the time it takes to train a graphic artist up in Gimp vastly exceeds the cost of Photoshop, if they already know Photoshop. It's not that Photoshop is more _stable_ than the Gimp.

I think in this case its not a matter of license but of availability. If the only integrated thing is adobes set of produts, than that is what you go for. If you would have it available in open source, you would go for that. Somwhat I am missing in this article what the licensing has to do with it.

Just my 2c EUR

The Adobe suite of creative development tools is no doubt very slick. I wouldn't know though, since your company would have me agree to the terms of your EULA, which expressively forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on competing Flash technologies. This is vendor lock-in, pure and simple. It is hampering decent competition in this field (open-source or otherwise).

There is no doubt Adobe Suite is better for the confessional.for doing little things, opensource is better.

We have a big laboratory with hundreds of Linux computers (because of POSIX), and we cannot install Adobe products on it, a pity, we have to adapt open solutions for our graphic necessities.

Expensive? Yes, as having to deploy Windows network complexities and restart machines are.

I put this response up on the Cnet news story. Figured I'd post the same response into here.

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I see a lot of posts on this story suggesting that Opening the Source Code would mean that Adobe would have to give their product away.

THAT IS FALSE INFORMATION.

Several Open Source Licenses, specifically the GPLv2, allow for the financial sale of the software.

Additional terms also found in the GPLv2 means that Adobe only has to give Source Code to their CLIENTS, e.g., PAYING CUSTOMERS. This is what is happening with the MySQL Enterprise Server : http://www.linux.com/feature/118489

Even if Adobe did decide to open the Source Code up in to the general public under a GPL or MIT style license, it still wouldn't mean that they have to provide finished binary code. Several Open Source projects only offer .RPM or Source Tarballs for their products, leaving distributions like Mepis and Debian to produce their own .deb files.

Depending on the license and how the artwork is trademarked, if Adobe did open the Source code, they could make it so that any changes made to the source code outside of the official branch could not longer be called by the product name in question. This is what has happened with Debian and Mozilla : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conflict_between_Debian_and_Mozilla

FireFox software can only be called FireFox if the program is using the Binaries from Mozilla.com, or have special permissions. In the same manner, if Adobe opened up the source code to Photoshop, they could set terms in place that only builds from themselves can be named by Photoshop, therefor keeping brand integrity.

If it weren't for Adobe's extremely bad history on providing support for the stuff they do sell, I would make a comment about who would support the Open Source project... however, given that there already appears to be a rather active (if not hopping mad) community supporting Adobe's products as is, I think the community support portion would already be in place...

So, lets review. Opening up the Source Code does not mean that Adobe has to stop charging for the product. Opening up the source code also does not mean that somebody can simple release a pre-compiled Photoshop not supported or endorsed by Adobe.

Now, personally, it would be a good idea for Adobe to open up the Source Code under GPLv2. It would make getting the products to run on Playstation3 a lot easier... and lets be honest... a lot of us want to see exactly how fast CELL will chomp through renderings.

trying to post this comment again.
http://andy.brisgeek.com/archives/62#comment-8754

"He found he could spend his time taking full advantage of not only rich feature sets but the incredible integration of the products."

You're telling me that the Macromedia applications that you guys bought 2 years ago (was it less than 2 years ago?) are tightly integrated? What's that I smell? (Unless you mean matching cute logos == tight integration)

"Open sourcing Solaris allowed that community to do what they really loved - tinker with the code to their hearts content."

Oh, right. TINKER. That's only for technical people. Creatives don't tinker. (Ew! Scary!)

"Don't get me wrong, open source software can be a perfect solution. It's just not right for everything. Or for everyone - like many creative professionals who are on deadline and prefer to innovate vs. integrate."

Sure, because the folks who use the software to produce beautiful creative works communicating and working directly with the developers of said software to improve it isn't innovative. Rather, what's innovative is being locked down into one tool that doesn't play well with tools from other brands and doesn't play well with OPEN STANDARDS so when you're in a time crunch you've got no options. (Having to work with assets that are in *.AI format and are Illustrator-exported SVGs is one of the banes of my existence.) An innovative creative is one who spends thousands of dollars they don't have every year or two to get the next latest and greatest which really isn't all that much different than what they bought 5 years ago.

What do you think about this scenario's innovative potential: College students who can't afford the software they need for class getting scared by the RIAA and MPAA picking them off at random and deciding to give free software a try rather than risking pirating proprietary product. And liking it. And liking it better.

Also, from one of your commenters:

"Unless a designer lives on an island and never has to share a single asset with a client, colleague, or service provider, it would be a foolish business decision to use anything but Adobe's set of tools."

Gee, that sounds like vendor lock-in doesn't it? Great selling point, that.

By the way, that business model won't work out so well as educational institutions learn more and more about the free software creative tools available out there and start putting high school, middle school, even elementary school students in front of them. How do you compete against that rich experience? I'll quote you again: "Less time on getting things to work meant he gets to spend more time on what he really loves." If I've been using the software in school for years why would I bother learning something new and different if the learning curve is going to keep me from production? :) :) :)

"Innovate or Integrate" is not a trade-off. It is possible to have both.

From the title it seems to equate Innovation to Open Source -> interesting.

There is no reason why a corporate backed productline cannot have a tightly integrated workflows *irrespective* of whether it is open source or not. The 2 aspects are orthogonal to each other :)

I've always wondered why companies don't go after customers they already have, rather than trying to get new ones.

They already have an is, so why not take advantage.

Hold that thought.

I've also wondered why it is that almost every "creative" uses and learns the version of Adobe they've been given and never the very latest.

I still know people who swear by Photoshop 5.5 for goodness sake!

The answer turns out to be that Adobe, whilst they have a good set of products — do not care.

I've spoken to people at many (news) organisations (in fact I used to work at News Ltd myself) and many of them would love to pay Adobe for a version of CS that worked on Linux – but it can't be bought for love or money.

Which is why they are drifting over the Free Software.

I'd love to upgrade my 4 licences (at a mere cost of AUD$10,000) so that they ran on Linux.

That AUD$10,000 spend would actually save me money.

But this is Adobe.

I'm not holding my breath.

You could always install Solaris... Adobe once sold Photoshop 3 for SPARC, if you can still find it anywhere :)

As the previous poster mentionned, sometimes, you dont have a choice of commercial or open source solutions. None of the Adobe products are available for Solaris. If all the products were available for the various Unix flavors, Adobe would surely expand their customer base.

So, how about CS3 for Solaris x86 and Sparc?