The thing that really put the final nail in the coffin for QuarkXpress wasn’t even quality or usability issues, it was cost. Once Adobe started bundling InDesign with their various Creative Suite software packages few designers wanted to pay many hundreds of dollars for the latest version of Quark when a “close enough” alternative was included with the Photoshop and Illustrator software they were buying already.
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I got sick of acrobat’s endless, massive adverts, and have been using Foxit for reading PDFs for at least a decade.
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Google as a whole doesn’t really care. Each individual VP’s fiefdom wants you to use something that counts as either dollars or users for them though, and each director wants the same and has only modestly more care about something that another director reporting to the same VP as something that belongs indirectly to another VP, and sometimes they don’t care any more about that then something a competitor company might make.
Individual workers are of corse individual, but any that prioritize getting a promotion care only about launching new products not supporting anything old. So Picasa already exists, they don’t want to touch it, wasted time. Launching a new image organizer and editor that is the safe path to promo! If you can’t do that taking some existing one that isn’t the current darling and adding a significant feature to it and launching that especially if it can be launched “like a new product” that is the second best path to promo! Anything else is a waste of time.
Which is not to say that some individuals don’t just decide they have enough total comp and they will work on some existing project just because they like it or they find it interesting, or it is “easy” and thus the safest way to hit “meets expectations”…
You don’t need a complex theory about local v remote or android v mac. If it is old it is unexciting. Launch a new one.
Only products that have a billion users or more have any real escape from that, and even there it isn’t a sure thing…
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There are also very good, professional-level apps that cost MUCH less and don’t tie users to a subscription or weird cloud nannying. I keep hearing people mention either piracy of Adobe, or freeware, and nothing else. Why? If Adobe is the standard of quality, why would you expect freeware to be a worthy replacement? Is zero dollars a reasonable budget for graphics software?
I pointed out that free and open-source products were good enough alternatives for people working outside corporate America. Professionals, including freelancers, work within that structure. I would agree that a paid alternative to Adobe products, with similar features (e g. CMYK mentioned above), is not only more appropriate but also often more necessary to their needs.
Also, unless I’ve missed something, no-one here mentioned piracy.
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Back when it was unclear who the front runner was going to be I started with Corel PhotoPaint.
But then I got a little more serious so I went with Photoshop.
I own CS5, until I need something it can’t do I’ll stick with it.
For photo editing I use Photoworks and Nikon’s RAW editor Capture NX.
I’ve tried switching to other open source graphics stuff but I know Photoshop well and it’s just easier because I know where everything is.
I also own Acrobat 8 because I have a lot of call for fillable PDFs for websites. I’m not sure there is an alternative for that.
I don’t ever see myself going to any subscription version of Adobe.
Same thing with Microsoft Office. I have Office 2010, it still works for everything I need.
But Office could easily be replaced with LibreOffice.
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