Software is one of the great enablers of this vast information economy we now live in. I use Microsoft Word to write a column, Excel to run my small business, and a host of other essential services, as they have become, for email hosting (Gmail), security (Kaspersky) and presentations (Keynote).
Add to that mix the new growth area of cloud storage (Google wants to upgrade me from 200GB a year to 2TB a month if I want it) and how much of our work lives are now thoroughly online. There are some jobs, even industries, that would not exist without the enabling software — especially the design industry. But what software gives, software can also take away, to upgrade that old adage.
There was an entire adjacent (to use the current popular word) subsection of the print industry that made the physical positives for the four-colour plates used to apply ink, which amounted to a 16% surcharge on any printed product. Adobe’s portable document format (PDF) destroyed that industry in the early 2000s and it disappeared almost overnight, as did the innumerable repro houses (short for reproduction).
No dominant software maker will have reached that position without making a few enemies and angry customers — who never forgive you for moving the thingimabob in version 7. They will hold a farible (Yiddish for grudge).
But some monopolies are worse than others, while some monopolists can reform themselves. Yes, Microsoft is a unique and unexpected case study on becoming a benevolent monopolist — and one with solid corporate governance. This is the reason I trust Microsoft the most of the service providers I use.
Similarly, I have always known that giving Apple my credit card details is one of the safest things you can do. There’s no way Apple will let someone steal my details to run up my bill — that’s Apple’s job.
And then there is Adobe. Of all the market-dominating behemoths I have encountered in my career, I like the makers of this essential software for the design industry the least. Why, when Photoshop and InDesign are what my small media business uses for our print publication, now only 10% of our annual turnover?
Why should I take offence that people who earn in rand are forced to pay the same as those in dollars or pounds? Why should I take offence that people in Joburg, Nairobi or Lagos must pay New York prices? Why, indeed, should you object to the one-size-fits-all pricing model that is frankly outrageously expensive, and that Adobe has profiteered from for a decade?
Even though it’s only 10% of what we do, we still have to pay Adobe 100% of the licence fee. A single app (Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign) costs $23 (R395) a month on the annual plan. Its Creative Cloud Pro package with the major apps and 200GB of cloud storage will set you back $34 (R584) for the annual plan. It took me 15 minutes to work all of this out — and decipher Adobe’s sneaky way of pricing (monthly, annual paid either monthly or prepaid) — that I will never get back.
Microsoft, by way of comparison, offers you five extra users for its main productivity apps, each of whom gets 1TB of Azure storage for R1,500 a year (or R250 a person). This truly is the best value for money for an SME from a company once sued by the US government for its anticompetitive behaviour. (Given its stake in OpenAI and the controversies around the rampant copyright theft in the training of large-language models, this rosy corporate citizen image may change in future. Also, Teams sucks. I dread using it.)
Meanwhile, Adobe’s attempts to reinvent itself for the changing mobile age haven’t been going well. Its attempted $20bn takeover of its major competitor Figma in 2022 was halted by EU and UK watchdogs in 2023. Adobe was trying to buy its way out of its failed strategies with a $20bn purchase — more than its $17bn revenue in 2022; that’s how desperate it was — and still had to pay Figma a $1bn termination fee as insult to injury.
Anyone who has used Photoshop or InDesign will tell you how complicated and difficult they are — and why long-time users are still faribled years later for the many inexplicable changes that made Adobe’s software more complicated.
The adage that “rarely are the kings of one era the kings of the next” is especially true for Adobe considering its latest competitor, the made-for-mobile Canva. It’s not made for high-end designers but for the rest of the world’s software users. Canva held a launch event in Rosebank this week to announce the opening of an office in South Africa and showed off its many features and projects.
Everyone from Harambee to Rhodes University uses Canva, from academics and social media managers to people looking for a job. It’s an easy product to sell given that it is not only easy to use but has a very generous free tier. “We are living in a visual world, only getting more visual every year,” says Duncan Clark, Canva’s head for Europe, Middle East and Africa. This is a trend also been seen in journalism and data journalism. “Everything works better in terms of engagement and communication when it’s more visual.”
Adobe’s revenue in 2024 was $21.5bn, so obituaries are being written too soon. But they ultimately will be. We’ve seen this movie before. The dominant player has already captured all the market share it’s going to, while nimbler competitors are eating its lunch in terms of functionality and cost. Once there was really only one design suite of essential apps, from Adobe, and now there are many more players.
Ultimately, when the Adobe case study is written, there will be many reasons for its loss of status and market dominance. It won’t completely die — whole swathes of the design industry rely on its apps, while many high-end designers are trained in it, and it is good software. But it will be the preserve of a shrinking, elite pool of users.
Meanwhile, Canva et al are forging ahead with newer things — a simpler interface, more apps integrated into a single user interface. Competition is a good thing, and the design industry has been overly reliant on one dominant, and domineering, company for too long.
• Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za.
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