---
title: Never Adobe
date: 2024-09-13T13:52:32.304Z
slug: 2024-09-13-never-adobe
author: Thomas Wilson

---
While listening to [an episode of](https://syntax.fm/show/817/you-need-these-30-apps-part-1/transcript) the Syntax Podcast, I heard one of the hosts say something like: 

> I am a Never Adobe kind of person. 

And I love this idea.  Because my perception of Adobe, as someone who has a passing interest in making better photographs, is a company that wants to build efficient machines for taking more of my money, more reliably.  They do not strike me as a company who want me to make better photographs - that feels more incidental. 

Like every company, I am sure there are good individuals in there, fighting for the business to stand with, not opposite, the people it serves.  Unfortunately I don't think those voices are having a meaningful impact.  Or perhaps the corporate structure and incentives make it sort of impossible to listen to them.  

Frankly, I don't really care enough to figure out how generously I should interpret Adobe's consumer-facing practices.  Now that the company is being sued by the US government on antitrust ground, [in an interview with The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/25/24205774/adobe-ftc-lawsuit-creative-cloud-cancellation-fees-heroin) Adobe's Chief Trust Officer:

1. clarifies (in one sentence) that early termination fees are 50% of remaining payment for a year's subscription, and then immediately states they couldn't display that at checkout because "it’s not a big box"
2. the idea that they're obfuscating pricing at checkout is baseless and something they've been trying to solve since October 2021.  To be clear, this is not a problem, and if it was a problem, we've been trying really hard for *years* to address it.

It's not my job and I am tired, but this sort of sinks, right?  I worry I would be the only party engaging in this discussion in good faith.

I'm sure that their checkout conversion rate is incredible, and that might be what they have indexed for. 

It's not that I had subscription services.  I'm a happy to see money go out of my account for Netflix, fairly procured coffee, safe file backups, a reliable internet connection, and gym access.  I think it's maybe more true that Adobe treat me like a mark, a little baby they can trick for their pocket money.

I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation to want to cancel any of the above, at any point.  But Adobe would disagree.

These past months, as I've been making more photos in raw format, I've been relying more on tooling and workflows to triage more and bigger photos.  

I frankly have little to no interest to spending _thousands_ of pounds in the next one-to-fifty years of my life (let's see how much of a phase photography is) for these kinds of workflows.  

But, let me tell you, this is *the* path of least resistance here.  Their Photoshop and Lightroom products are just dominant.  One of those is a verb now.  You don't even say "I'm going to PowerPoint at the meeting" or "she Excel'd it, and our forecast is good".  How many other pieces of software (not web services) are verbs?