Adobe’s Cornered Marketplace
Interesting recent article on Pingdom, which makes a point against Adobe’s dominance and suite of products not necessarily being a good thing for innovation in the web and graphic design arena. It’s an interesting read which goes through the history and evolution of web and image design applications over the last 15 years, and how Adobe has slowly acquired or crushed them all to sit atop the heap.
While we were busy working, Adobe took over the Internet. More specifically, Adobe’s software took over just about every aspect of web design and development. Is this really a good thing for web designers and developers? Or for web users? Or for anyone, other than Adobe? My answer is a resolute, unwavering “No”.
Many older web and graphic designers slash developers, will remember fondly older products such as Jasc’s PaintShop and Ulead PhotoImpact, which were far cheaper and had some great innovations compared to earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop 1 through 4, which were quite limited. Nowadays, with Adobe’s “Master Collection”, it’s almost taken for granted where some of these innovations have come from, or that half of the products once existed on their own with their own successful history – such as Macromedia’s DreamWeaver, FireWorks and Flash.
You can read the full article over at Pingdom
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