alt Hacker NewsFor the record, I believe that the whole "building something as good as Photoshop" is BS, and a sort of retroactive justification of lock-in.
Yes, building something as complicated and locked in as Microsoft Word required a lot of work, and Microsoft has gained considerable money and power over it, but that doesn't mean that Word is necessarily good.
No different from "McDonald's hamburgers are objectively very good."
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Outside of specialized niches, toll booths exist due to network effects.
Most of the revenue for Adobe is not due to individuals who need a competent standalone tool. It’s for organizations that need all of the usual qualities:
1) continuity with prior work (my old projects open properly, last year’s training is still relevant)
2) being able to hire/train employees on the tool
3) collaborating externally
4) interoperability across work products (eg vector, raster, video, etc)
You are not getting any of that from someone’s vibe coded weekend project.
I still have a copy of Photoshop 7 burned on a CD. Photoshop was once really excellent, back before its glory was clouded by subscriptions.
Word is better than the alternatives. In Germany they keep going through the cycle of open source zealots mandating that government workers use off-brand office suites and then their unions going on strike to get Word back.
For a while I thought it was annoying that Word wanted to save my documents in the cloud but then I realized I could keep my lifestyle diary for my nutritionist in Word and update it on my iPad on the go and it works great.