Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
This past week, Adobe became the subject of a public relations firestorm after it pushed an update to its terms of service that many users saw at best as overly aggressive and at worst as a rights grab. Adobe quickly clarified it isn’t spying on users and even promised to go back and adjust its terms of service in response.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
Unfortunately, they were also recently acquired by Canva. It may be all right for the time being, but I wouldn’t throw my full weight behind them anymore.
Canva is an aggressively for profit company. They use the freemium model to manipulate users into FOMO, pay-walling the actually useful parts of their product offering. They are an unicorn startup from Australia. They want to engorge the entirety of the design and office market all at once, thus have expanded fast but entirely on the basis of venture capitalism and stock trading. They, as far as I can recall, are not entirely profitable yet*. This means that their model is incompatible with Affinity’s model and brings about the fear that they will enshittify Affinity very soon in order to either try to promote their desired monopoly or to flow in some short-term profits.
*: They are profitable, but still their model is embrace, extend, extinguish, just like MS. And subscription based monetization is still icky and contrary to Affinity’s original vision.
You’re not wrong! But at least for now I got a decent PS alternative for $45. We’ll see how things go.
