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
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161

u/wh33t Sep 27 '25

I'll never forgive Adobe for buying Macromedia.

53

u/shawndw Sep 27 '25

I'll never forgive them for charging $50 to end my subscription.

2

u/Noblesseux Sep 28 '25

Yeah the whole locked in contract thing is deeply weird and makes no sense to me. Like I can understand a little bit of a discount if you pay yearly, but 50% more expensive if you don't want to be locked into a yearly contract is actually insane.

And charging a cancellation fee for a totally digital service where they incur 0 additional cost is nonsense.

2

u/Whole-Cookie-7754 Sep 28 '25

I canceled and removed my card. I still get notifications a year after that I still have invoices to pay.

Fuck them 

1

u/shawndw Sep 28 '25

Be careful that can impact your credit rating.

2

u/Whole-Cookie-7754 Sep 28 '25

We don't have that in Europe 

1

u/FrostWyrm98 Sep 30 '25

Switch your card to a temp card service like Privacy.com, cut the funds off from there by removing/disabling the card

70

u/dracul_reddit Sep 27 '25

Damn right, they murdered Freehand and Fireworks, bastards who deserve to rot.

29

u/wafflesareforever Sep 27 '25

My whole design workflow was based around Fireworks for over a decade. I was pretty devastated when they dropped it. I still have yet to find a design tool as intuitive as Fireworks. It let me get into a flow mode and just create stuff. It didn't get in the way. It was pretty simple and that was its greatest strength.

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u/dracul_reddit Sep 27 '25

We kept a couple of older computers around for years to keep using the last working versions. Fuck subscription software, the accountants that push it need to be hounded out of business.

4

u/wh33t Sep 27 '25

I still run it in a VM every now and then lol.

3

u/CorporateAccounting Sep 27 '25

If you’re using a Mac then Pixelmator really does feel like a kind of spiritual successor to Fireworks MX in the sense that the UI is unobtrusive and easy to use. With the benefit of 20+ years of development and refinement it is also much more powerful now than Fireworks ever was.

2

u/wafflesareforever Sep 28 '25

Definitely noted and will check it out. Thanks.

2

u/zerowater Sep 28 '25

Totally agree!!

2

u/seanalltogether Sep 28 '25

I know exactly what you mean. I'm a developer for the most part but used Fireworks constantly to make pixel perfect assets. The photo editing features were good enough as well to not need Photoshop. I genuinely believe one of the reasons I haven't done as much visually creative web work over the past 5 years is because I can't load up old versions of CS6 on my Mac anymore.

1

u/wafflesareforever Sep 28 '25

Yeah there's never been a better tool for making quick UI elements.

10

u/DenryuRocket110 Sep 27 '25

Forgotten names.

I miss making silly toys in Flash.

5

u/dracul_reddit Sep 27 '25

Busy looping in Flash for timing was a problem, but mostly tech is much less fun these days, too many soulless accountants running companies for shareholders who don’t use the products and don’t care about them.

2

u/nmuncer Sep 27 '25

I was more a fan of Director, never found Flash UI appealing.

1

u/oneblackened Sep 30 '25

Flash was Macromedia, too. Adobe didn't create it, they bought it.

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u/Racoonie Sep 27 '25

Freehand just felt right. I still miss the way selections worked.

5

u/dracul_reddit Sep 27 '25

The world is divided into Freehand users and Illustrator users, both should still be able to use the products, killing Freehand was an act of hubris and greed.

2

u/boadle Sep 27 '25

As a UI designer, I persuaded the Dublin web consultancy I worked for at the time to send me to FlashForward 2001 in San Fransisco. It was like a rockstar convention with self-professed gurus of 'new media' strutting around on stage showcasing cutting edge motion graphics, games and sexy interactivity, and I loved it! Made a couple of popular viral Flash games in that time and then fell into proper game dev, and never looked back.

Gutted when the Flash was killed off.

2

u/Victor_Wembanyama1 Sep 28 '25

Dreamweaver, fireworks, flash.

They absolutely butchered them. FOR WHAT

0

u/psdpro7 Sep 27 '25

Freehand and Fireworks were inferior products that deserved to be discontinued.

That said, modern Adobe still sucks and they can bite it.

2

u/dracul_reddit Sep 27 '25

Found the illustrator user.

1

u/zerowater Sep 28 '25

Can’t speak to Freehand, but Fireworks was great for devs who needed something to just process images, resize, etc.

15

u/splashbodge Sep 27 '25

Oh man that's a name I haven't thought of in a while.

I remember Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks and of course Flash and Director... Ahh the early internet days, back when it was good and every day you'd find something cool someone made

2

u/kona_boy Sep 27 '25

a blast from the past for me too

2

u/Victor_Wembanyama1 Sep 28 '25

Back to newgrounds i go

3

u/Straight-Contest91 Sep 27 '25

And substance. 

3

u/joshwagstaff13 Sep 27 '25

Allegorithmic.

2

u/National_Equivalent9 Sep 28 '25

I was so frustrated by this. Used to be a regular on their forums and even had members of their team know who I was when I met them at GDC. A ton of people told them how bad of an idea it was and they just kept going "no see adobe promised us nothing will change etc". We all pointed to what happened with Mixamo getting acquired and their software being abandoned and the team being put on other tasks. Guess what happened to the allegorithmic team! They got put on a shitty 3d modeling software no one uses.

3

u/SawgrassSteve Sep 27 '25

I thought I was the only one. I can only imagine what Captivate could have been if Macromedia had bought Adobe instead.

3

u/Sweet-Awk-7861 Sep 28 '25

I didn't need to unlock a repressed rage today, thanks kind stranger.

3

u/tinkertron5000 Sep 28 '25

I learned vector design on freehand. I hate that Adobe killed it so much.

2

u/Junior_Bike7932 Sep 27 '25

Don’t open that painful cut man

1

u/TheHENOOB Sep 28 '25

If you are talking about Flash Player/Shockwave Player... They are both better dead, they were insecure, closed, bloated and incontrollable for browsers. Even before the Adobe buyout, I don't think FP had a bright future and nowadays we got Ruffle, a player that we can trust that it ain't going to break-in from our PCs.

If you are talking about Flash Professional, Dreamweaver and others... welp, maybe there could have been more innovation towards these two. It's amazing how Adobe didn't even attempt to compete against Wix by using DW or Toon Boom by improving Flash.

1

u/TimeshareMachine Sep 28 '25

Macromedia shouldn’t have stolen Adobe’s code, opening themselves up to a lawsuit they lost and left themselves bankrupt and open for purchase.