Did Adobe Just Break Our Industry?

and was it ever that clear cut?

So, the world imploded yesterday. The subtle spinning of our glorious orb skipped for a second as Adobe finally announced the next step of their basically-annual Creative Suite. Thousands of people all waited eagerly to see what incremental and intricate changes they’d be delivering to what we all assumed would be CS7.

Of course, the reality has shocked and broken the legs of thousands of people, or that’s what you’d think from the reaction. “You’ve killed Fireworks!” “Fuck you Adobe, I want my box!” rung out across the twittersphere and whole civilisations fell.

What’s really happened is that Adobe have abandoned Creative Suite altogether - to what I would honestly refer to as a much simpler and more convenient model. Creative Cloud are the words on everyone’s lips but is it *really* that bad?

Of course it isn’t.

Fireworks has died (I’ve honestly never used it anyway but to those gutted by its demise I send my condolences), you get 20GB of free Cloud storage and a Typekit subscription for $49.99 per month INCLUDING unlimited local access to any of the Adobe Creative Suite programs we’ve come to love.

Everything is stored online, you can remove and reinstall the programs as you wish, everything is in one place and you don’t even have to use Premiere or Illustrator or any of the Edge Tools if you don’t want. Isn’t that a lot easier? Isn’t it a good thing that they’ve streamlined their damn-clunky existing product line?

However of course, this has raised some pretty interesting discussion in the field of Universal Formats. One universal Vector file type, one universal raster file type, one program that does everything.

I feel like the landscape is about to get a lot more interesting and I’m excited about this new model.

So to answer the title of this post - No. Adobe haven’t killed anything.