Adobe made a shocking announcement a few days ago, that Muse will soon end. Adobe offered only a very brief explanation as justification: "Trends in recent years have caused the company to evolve its strategies"! Are these trends good for us? What are these new "evolved" strategies that Adobe has adopted? Do you want to know?
Let's do some soul searching: Companies like Envato have sold millions of readymade templates for Adobe products since years and they made millions doing so. By making the lives of designers a lot easier, they have also done something huge in a much more subtly and silent way: They have slowly started to monopolize the creative realm, much like Amazon has done by taking business away from the streets. When creative people get lazy and stop to create, cloud-based technologies will happily fill the ranks.
It's been on the horizon for some time: Companies like Wix catering fast-food websites to anyone (Rest in peace Muse!); Online video magicians like Magisto, WeVideo (Rip Premiere), Animaker with animated videos online (RIP Adobe Character Animator), gazillion photo apps (RIP Lightroom and Photoshop), online vector apps and so on. The list is endless. Let's not forget, as computer processing power improves even further, server technologies evolve, and artificial intelligence has finally outsmarted us, all areas of the creative industry will be affected. This will include Premiere and After Effects users as well, even though you might still feel you still have lots of time left. You don't. Things are moving way to quickly.
To me Adobe's mid- and long-term strategy is crystal clear: ALL apps & services will eventually be service, AND project based. You will have to pay for every project that you create using their products. It will also be template based. You will also pay for that. It will also be hosted, so you will also pay for that. You will also become more and more dependent as you use their services. If technology makes it possible, which large money-making cooperation living in the pressure cooker of investors today would not? Its way to tempting.
What Adobe is effectively attempting to do right now, employing their new strategy, is to re-take income which they feel they have lost to companies like Envato, Wix and many others. Judging from Adobe's reaction to our outcries in recent days (which was zero to none), you as a creative entity have a very minor to no role to play in all this.
By making features server based and easier to use, Adobe has decided to broaden its appeal and go for the consumer directly: Consumers that until recently have been the clients of the creative industry. In fact, yes these have been our clients. By making all apps server based, with accounts tied to many other goodies, there is of course also a downside for the consumer, as the consumer becomes more and more dependent. Just like we have become dependent on Google, Facebook and Amazon. For convenience sake. Btw, who of you is willing to cancel their Facebook account, knowing you will lose access to WhatsApp (yes, it's part of Facebook). Now you know why its been free. Its not. Its the leash keeping you tied in.
If everything is server based, all transactions and services become traceable, which in turn will greatly benefit Adobe's larger marketing cloud. It's their service that has already brought in 1/3 of revenues for Adobe. Its only a matter of time until the marketing executives paying for these services will eventually be made obsolete by them. You buy into convenience to quickly, you will get run over eventually. Muse users are feeling it right now and its never easy to feel betrayed. Muse users will smile and hand you good advice that they have heard themselves before: Move on!
Adobe's new strategy? Yes, it essentially entails the burial of your creative business! Creativity will now be sold to consumers directly and turned into a fast food product. There might be some room for Chefs cooking up the exceptional. But that's more like a handful out of a million.
Photoshop users, video editing folks and all of you looking at Muse user's unfortunate days from a safe distant: You will be next, and your safety margin is shrinking rapidly! I understand that Muse is only the beginning of Adobe's new evolved strategy. A bully will always turn his attention to the weakest link first. If you don't help the weak, you will be next.
From an ethical stand point I can make to following observation: Adobe is not just keeping up with an evolved world. Let's face it, it's also very tempting for a large corporation to sell features in an app every time someone uses web-based services, rather than selling those features one time to a creative community. When Apps were still software products, buying a license was good for years. Now we pay monthly. Very soon we will pay every time we use the service. Also, why should Adobe let clients in between re-sell to consumers, if Adobe has the technology and the money to do it directly?
What you will observe in the next years to come is the biggest heist in creative software history, subtly justified simply by two words "recent trends". You will see it start small (Muse) but slowly grow to encompass all apps you come to love. As we were taught in high school, if you turn up the heat slowly, frogs don't realize they're being cooked!
Trends in recent years, that phrase becomes the ultimate justification to sack our businesses. Just like Amazon has sacked so many street-based retail businesses in recent years, it's all justified to law makers as "recent trends". The downside of these trends has huge implications for many small companies, whose daily bread will become centralized in the hands of a few. Big co-operations are not creating new markets (as they should be) they are stealing ours. I don't quite see the benefit for our society as a whole in the long run. Correct me if I'm wrong! Soon there won't be any other business to turn to, since all areas will be affected. Planes won't need pilots and busses no driver.
Trends aside, the sinister aftertaste lies not solely in the fact that we as a creative community are silently being sacked, but in the fact that we have made Adobe who they are now. We paid Adobe and by doing so, we sadly paid for our own demise.
I would never dare to claim ill-intend on the part of any corporation's CEO's. They are getting paid to stir their ship into deeper waters were the fish are plenty. That they do so with lack a of social responsibility is another topic.
I do think we will see some legal and political battles ahead, as the rift between rich and poor will put a lot of pressure on breaking up (not only monopolies) but also centralized firms like Facebook, Google, Amazon and others. We are seeing the beginnings. Europe will lead the charge, I am sure. Maybe the US will follow.
Let me end by reminding us, just because something is legal, does not mean it is right or good. Neither for society or beneficial to each one of us for that matter. The common good is what has driven the Western World into the great nations they are today. Technology has become a threat to us, as technology does not understand the meaning of the words "common good". Artificial Intelligence will never understand the true meaning of these words, but it will have the tools to make their subjects go away.
Let me conclude by broadening the context to include other fields, that most certainly will be affected as well (you may feel some sense of malicious joy now). Because it's not just us. Lawyers, especially those in defense of big corporation today, you should understand that the creation of contracts, license agreements and legal documents will be the next big hit in cloud-based services.
I am sure that as we are having this discussion right now, new AI technology are being developed that will render your legal services quicker, cheaper and more reliable than you will ever be able to provide them. And unlike a website that some will still take pride in, because it was created by a human being, no one will care who drafted up the license agreement. But it will affect ALL OF US and make us more dependent on a few large corporations.
You decide if that's a good thing. You decide if you want to accept trends blindly or help set them! The former makes us sheep, the later human beings.
Cheers.
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