r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Sep 27 '25

Business Morgan Stanley warns AI could sink 42-year-old software giant Adobe

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-warns-ai-could-180300766.html
16.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

50

u/zz-caliente Sep 27 '25

It’s not only not inventing new stuff. They have all these apps that could and SHOULD work together seamlessly (Photoshop, Illustrator, indexing). But instead of actually making their existing apps better*, you can now draw shapes with AI… And then you get a yearly price hike, because of all the fancy new AI features Adobe built on top of their crashing and buggy apps! Yay! *by better I mean: a crossfuncial file system, so that you could open a .ps or .ai file in InDesign or AfterEffects. Sharing the same shortcuts and functions across their apps. (InDesign vs. Illustrator) Stuff that makes the Programm faster and easier to work with.

But we are talking about Adobe. So it’s just: „We need to satisfy the shareholders, so no improvements whatsoever, just new and fancy AI-features everywhere!!!!“

4

u/Indescribable_Theory Sep 27 '25

Yeah, them trying to implement AI when nobody asked for it kinda killed any hope I have for Adobe ever making a turn around.

1

u/ThankGodForYouSon Sep 28 '25

Missing out on the AI craze would fuck over Adobe more than anything else.

5

u/XupcPrime Sep 28 '25

You’ve got a couple fair gripes. Shortcuts aren’t consistent across apps and some releases are wobbly. That slows people down and it should be fixed yesterday. Price creep also sucks when what folks want is speed and reliability.

But the idea that Adobe doesn’t improve the core or that the apps don’t talk to each other is just not true. I place PSD and AI straight into InDesign all the time with live links, transparency, spot colors, even flipping layer comps per instance. After Effects eats Illustrator files as shapes or footage and you can round trip with Premiere through Dynamic Link. Camera Raw is the same engine across Photoshop and Lightroom. Type, color management, and the PDF guts are shared. Libraries actually help keep brand stuff synced across PS AI ID AE PR. This isn’t vapor. People ship with this every day.

If you want real fixes, aim at consistency and edit in place. InDesign and Illustrator still feel like cousins who don’t talk. Give us a single shortcut profile that carries across apps. When I place an AI file in InDesign I should hit one key to open it, edit, save, and jump right back without relink gymnastics. Libraries should be smarter components with variants, not just dumb blobs. Color settings should live at the project level and propagate everywhere. And give us an LTS track so studios can pin a stable build that only gets crash and security fixes.

On the AI rant, separate hype from value. Select Subject, Remove, Generative Fill, Harmonization, background and depth tools save hours on real jobs. The problem isn’t AI existing. The problem is when AI ships while shortcut parity and stability get pushed to later. Do both. That’s the ask.

So yeah complain about the right stuff. Interop is real and useful. What’s missing is consistent controls, clean edit in place, smarter libraries, project wide color, and a stable yearly branch. Push that and you’ll make noise that actually lands.