The death of big software
Discussion
Sorry, another AI thread, but this one is quite specific related to the news over the weekend that a team has vibe coded the whole adobe suite and given it away for free. In a week.
I’m a keen photographer, I’ve watched a few videos and downloaded the lightroom clone. It’s damn good. It’s only a few updates away from covering everything I use.
Secondly, talking to some coworkers and friends, many no longer use the MS suite except for outlook. They build and maintain their docs, presentations and spreadsheets inside their AI workflow.
While this is an early adopter landscape right now, what does 3 or 6 or 9 months look like for the big software vendors?
Is the AI bubble going to break more than just some of the AI players?
I’m a keen photographer, I’ve watched a few videos and downloaded the lightroom clone. It’s damn good. It’s only a few updates away from covering everything I use.
Secondly, talking to some coworkers and friends, many no longer use the MS suite except for outlook. They build and maintain their docs, presentations and spreadsheets inside their AI workflow.
While this is an early adopter landscape right now, what does 3 or 6 or 9 months look like for the big software vendors?
Is the AI bubble going to break more than just some of the AI players?
HorneyMX5 said:
Sorry, another AI thread, but this one is quite specific related to the news over the weekend that a team has vibe coded the whole adobe suite and given it away for free. In a week.
I m a keen photographer, I ve watched a few videos and downloaded the lightroom clone. It s damn good. It s only a few updates away from covering everything I use.
Secondly, talking to some coworkers and friends, many no longer use the MS suite except for outlook. They build and maintain their docs, presentations and spreadsheets inside their AI workflow.
While this is an early adopter landscape right now, what does 3 or 6 or 9 months look like for the big software vendors?
Is the AI bubble going to break more than just some of the AI players?
.I m a keen photographer, I ve watched a few videos and downloaded the lightroom clone. It s damn good. It s only a few updates away from covering everything I use.
Secondly, talking to some coworkers and friends, many no longer use the MS suite except for outlook. They build and maintain their docs, presentations and spreadsheets inside their AI workflow.
While this is an early adopter landscape right now, what does 3 or 6 or 9 months look like for the big software vendors?
Is the AI bubble going to break more than just some of the AI players?
There's a bit more to this IMHO, though I'd admit I've seen the headline but not read any detail. However, as much as I hate the move to paying an initial cost and then having to pay an ongoing subscription...
What is really meant by vibe coding the entire suite? Start from scratch and create a facsimile, or as seems to have become acceptable now, pretty much much steal what you like via AI and then recreate?
Who is going to ensure that the copy is stable, secure and updated on a regular basis? You could add model drift into this.
Is there any consideration of any liability and other legal issues?
Would anything change when the actual cost of AI is being paid by all users, rather than a highly subsidised subscription, as at the moment.
Privacy - It might be free, but as always, your information will be the price. Probably not that important for photos, but I wouldn't like to be donating my information to a frontier AI lab via a spreadsheet.
Sounds good in theory, but in practice, it may be less so, especially to a company. I'd also be concerned if I had employees putting numbers in an AI workflow, assuming it isn't a local one with rather strong walls.
Look behind the hype and you'll find the unfinished, glitching, not very good reality. With a s
tty license attached just to complete the replica.
Any idiot with a magic duplicator can throw st together as a copy of something else with duplicates of the simplest functions ripped from other projects and guess what, someone did.
Not that the Adobe stuff is perfect but the hype cycle is getting stupid and a lot of people are too ignorant to understand what they're looking at.
Same reason people buy so much Chinese crap that doesn't really work but looks shiny from a distance.
tty license attached just to complete the replica.Any idiot with a magic duplicator can throw s
t together as a copy of something else with duplicates of the simplest functions ripped from other projects and guess what, someone did. Not that the Adobe stuff is perfect but the hype cycle is getting stupid and a lot of people are too ignorant to understand what they're looking at.
Same reason people buy so much Chinese crap that doesn't really work but looks shiny from a distance.
We use Adobe Creative Cloud at work. I think the annual licence is £800-900 per user and we pay it. Why? Because most of the alternatives aren't as good, have limitations, or the nth time you want to encode something using the free/cheaper clone, you have to "upgrade" the licence, and the upgrade will always be at a critical time when you have a deadline to meet. 
People are being driven away from big software houses because of the ensh*tification process, previously it was very difficult to make an alternative even if you got together with your equally enraged colleagues to make a free version for the masses just out of spite.
Now it is not so hard, most people will only use the minority of a modern big package anyway (Yes, whoever you are I am sure you use 100%, but MOST users don't), software houses built in the most common functionality ages ago and since then they have had to find ways to make people buy or subscribe.
Even if this new 'homemade' version was perfect it is most likely to go down the same path for the same reason unless they can maintain a different business model.
As for patches, they will be made in the same way the software was.
Of course new packages will come along from time to time from big software houses but they will also go down the same route, it becomes up to the user to take on the task of riding the wave and bailing to the next product at the right point, whether it be from MS to Apple or from them to Linux, etc.
Now it is not so hard, most people will only use the minority of a modern big package anyway (Yes, whoever you are I am sure you use 100%, but MOST users don't), software houses built in the most common functionality ages ago and since then they have had to find ways to make people buy or subscribe.
Even if this new 'homemade' version was perfect it is most likely to go down the same path for the same reason unless they can maintain a different business model.
As for patches, they will be made in the same way the software was.
Of course new packages will come along from time to time from big software houses but they will also go down the same route, it becomes up to the user to take on the task of riding the wave and bailing to the next product at the right point, whether it be from MS to Apple or from them to Linux, etc.
Can't see any proper business moving any of their business critical systems to something knocked up on AI. Build vs Buy has been a thing in software sales for years, and most still buy for the reasons that would apply here with this Temu adobe - resiliance, support, ability to scale with business, interconnectivity with other parts of the business, robust partner network trained in said product etc.
Too many members of the public think software is a consumer game and it matters what we as individuals are doing, the truth is that b2b contracts are where the vast majority of the money comes from. Adobe revenue is 80-90% b2b.
Too many members of the public think software is a consumer game and it matters what we as individuals are doing, the truth is that b2b contracts are where the vast majority of the money comes from. Adobe revenue is 80-90% b2b.
Gnits said:
People are being driven away from big software houses because of the ensh*tification process...
It's the move to subscription that annoys me.I'd already paid a fortune for the full Adobe Creative Suite and now, if I want to keep it up-to-date, I have to pay £66.49/month for Creative Cloud. I wouldn't mind making a reasonable one-off payment to upgrade but I'm not subscribing at the same rate as someone who's never had it when I've already paid over a grand. For now I've got my original Creative Suite running on a 2017 MacBook Pro.
Edited by MitchT on Monday 12th October 09:53
MitchT said:
Gnits said:
People are being driven away from big software houses because of the ensh*tification process...
It's the move to subscription that annoys me.But also the stream of stupid changes and bugs in things that should be stable because they dont need touching, which in turn seem mostly to track back to people thinking they can trust vibe coding and automation to maintain things and just spraying s
t everywhere in the process.The other thing that slightly curses this fake Adobe suite is doing it in Rust, because every other Rust port seems to end up as an AI mess of only mostly working, bloated, randomly breaking compatibility, and never fixed, but it's 'better' as if that's only the critical goal.
Perhaps 'AI' is just stealing the code rather than creating it from scratch, as they use source code repositories and perhaps even decompilation to reverse engineer code. So like the story below about 'AI' solving a long standing math problem just after a team of humans submitted enough info about their ongoing work to be used by the learning models, purely coincidental of course.
OpenAI says it cracked 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7zygy3rl2o
The real problem is the 'AI' companies using their position to suck up information and knowledge to 'learn' how to do it itself when really it's a very sophisticated algorithm designed to piece together information found elsewhere. No 'AI' can do any of this without access to suitable sources to 'learn' from.
Therefore it's plagiarism. Perhaps they'll give enough credit to the sources to avoid those claims, but no one ever looks at that, it's all the magic of 'AI'.
OpenAI says it cracked 90-year-old maths problem in 88 hours
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7zygy3rl2o
The real problem is the 'AI' companies using their position to suck up information and knowledge to 'learn' how to do it itself when really it's a very sophisticated algorithm designed to piece together information found elsewhere. No 'AI' can do any of this without access to suitable sources to 'learn' from.
Therefore it's plagiarism. Perhaps they'll give enough credit to the sources to avoid those claims, but no one ever looks at that, it's all the magic of 'AI'.
I don't think there's any putting the genie back in the bottle, plagiarism or not. Software dev is in freefall. Some areas will be more resistant to it than others, such as those where support contracts are required, the UK has been relatively resistant with it's significantly lower salaries than the US, but the entire industry is effectively seeing a huge increase in supply without a corresponding increase in demand and so prices will fall across the board, while the numbers competing for the jobs remaining will increase.
People were prematurely predicting this many years ago, but I think we're seeing it happen now. There's potential for it to create jobs too, but it won't be offsetting the losses anytime soon.
People were prematurely predicting this many years ago, but I think we're seeing it happen now. There's potential for it to create jobs too, but it won't be offsetting the losses anytime soon.
I've always wondered how these AI generated products handle the attribution and redistribution licence requirements of most open source repositories which they are presumably using as "influence". I don't mean inclusion of libraries themselves, I mean the wholesale lifting of code snippets and mixing them together.
Given the very long running saga of SCO vs IBM went down to comparing code snippets and patterns at one point in time, is this a ticking time bomb waiting to happen?
On the subject of the creative suite alternative, it'll work for some and not for others, just like DarkTable and GIMP are enough for some people.
I can't see a wholesale migration of professional photographers abandoning their subscriptions when their livelihoods depend upon it, they're more likely to move to an alternative paid and supported competitor instead.
Given the very long running saga of SCO vs IBM went down to comparing code snippets and patterns at one point in time, is this a ticking time bomb waiting to happen?
On the subject of the creative suite alternative, it'll work for some and not for others, just like DarkTable and GIMP are enough for some people.
I can't see a wholesale migration of professional photographers abandoning their subscriptions when their livelihoods depend upon it, they're more likely to move to an alternative paid and supported competitor instead.
As others have said, the whole thing is a bit hype and false advertising. And while it is fair to heavily dislike Adobe and its practices, they have spent years developing the software.
There are 'OK' alternatives, again, as others have said. At the moment, I don't think AI is going to come in and kill the big software products. Will it have a huge impact on the smaller stuff, little apps etc? Absolutely. It is trivially easy to get some of the simpler things built using AI.
Bug fixing is a huge one though, it has made that job a lot easier. I've used it several times to either fix a bug or extend an open source piece of software with an extra feature.
I've even created a small Android app for my personal use. And those are the things that will have the biggest impact. Either small apps will just get less traction or many people will be using multiple, slightly different versions of the same thing (which will have security concerns). Especially as a lot of devs, not unreasonably, will not accept an AI generated fix or adjustment.
There are 'OK' alternatives, again, as others have said. At the moment, I don't think AI is going to come in and kill the big software products. Will it have a huge impact on the smaller stuff, little apps etc? Absolutely. It is trivially easy to get some of the simpler things built using AI.
Bug fixing is a huge one though, it has made that job a lot easier. I've used it several times to either fix a bug or extend an open source piece of software with an extra feature.
I've even created a small Android app for my personal use. And those are the things that will have the biggest impact. Either small apps will just get less traction or many people will be using multiple, slightly different versions of the same thing (which will have security concerns). Especially as a lot of devs, not unreasonably, will not accept an AI generated fix or adjustment.
JoshSm said:
Look behind the hype and you'll find the unfinished, glitching, not very good reality. With a stty license attached just to complete the replica.
Any idiot with a magic duplicator can throw st together as a copy of something else with duplicates of the simplest functions ripped from other projects and guess what, someone did.
Not that the Adobe stuff is perfect but the hype cycle is getting stupid and a lot of people are too ignorant to understand what they're looking at.
Same reason people buy so much Chinese crap that doesn't really work but looks shiny from a distance.
Haven't seen this specific software so this is a generic comment but I largely agree with this.tty license attached just to complete the replica.Any idiot with a magic duplicator can throw s
t together as a copy of something else with duplicates of the simplest functions ripped from other projects and guess what, someone did. Not that the Adobe stuff is perfect but the hype cycle is getting stupid and a lot of people are too ignorant to understand what they're looking at.
Same reason people buy so much Chinese crap that doesn't really work but looks shiny from a distance.
If you currently use Adobe right now to do a job you get paid for you're probably not about to throw it away to try to do your job using something AI knocked up and which has absolutely no track record or industry standard etc.
In time who knows. But right now if your Marketing time asked to move from Creative Cloud to this I'd think they'd gone mad.
The guy who coded it has form, it's a small team of people and he's a software engineer by trade.
For professional users who use all the features of Adobe then maybe they'll keep paying, but for the more middling users, photographers etc who resent the licencing cost then I suspect many of them will look at the alternative.
Look at the Adobe share price - it's been going south for a couple of years as investors get wary of the subscription business model. All very well charging people per month, but then it becomes an ongoing cost rather than a sunk cost, and people see ongoing costs a lot more so than spending £2k and having it vanish from the books in 12m.
I'm torn, on the one hand we need people and companies to develop software, but I would argue that software companies greed has made a lot of people resent their business models.
For professional users who use all the features of Adobe then maybe they'll keep paying, but for the more middling users, photographers etc who resent the licencing cost then I suspect many of them will look at the alternative.
Look at the Adobe share price - it's been going south for a couple of years as investors get wary of the subscription business model. All very well charging people per month, but then it becomes an ongoing cost rather than a sunk cost, and people see ongoing costs a lot more so than spending £2k and having it vanish from the books in 12m.
I'm torn, on the one hand we need people and companies to develop software, but I would argue that software companies greed has made a lot of people resent their business models.
Investors aren’t worried what retail customers are doing or not doing, they’re a nothing on the balance sheet.
Businesses buy all major software on a contract basis, that isn’t going anywhere. Even if it moves to consumption of tokens (which is still just compute which many companies already priced on for years).
Businesses buy all major software on a contract basis, that isn’t going anywhere. Even if it moves to consumption of tokens (which is still just compute which many companies already priced on for years).
Adobe may well be the greatest thing for photography since Fox-Talbot, but the vast majority, and we’re talking 99%, of photographers don’t use anything near the full capability of the software. However, because it is the current industry standard, and the industry has bought into it, it stays at the top.
I belong to a camera club. The Adobe subscribers are like vegans; they tell you they have it within minutes of meeting. It’s a badge, telling everone they can afford it. None use it to its full extent. These are enthusiasts.
Vibe coding is great and some of the software packages produced are perfectly viable alternatives for specific functions but inherent in vibe coding is the seeds of its own demise. Others will copy it but won’t update and develop it, causing doubt and dissing open source. Darktable is an exception here.
After dumping Adobe I have used Affinity, this from the days of beta, that’s about a decade or so, and I still don’t use all the features. The current version is free, with AI subscriptions. For most photographers it’s not so much sufficient as ample.
I’ve always used free and open source software from the days of TBAG on my Amiga. I use Libre Office, Blender, Audacity, Darktable, Handbrake, as well as DaVinci Resolve, although I moved on from the free version to the paid-for Studio. But even that’s not subscription as it is a one-off payment. I’ve had it since v.17, a Covid gift. It is superb and released movies have been made using it, and many other have used its colour grading. Quality, and most of the Studio users could have got by with the free version. Probably I could.
I doubt I could have afforded all the paid-for alternatives to my apps list.
Open source and Free has earned its bad reputation, but there are some gems out there, and Affinity is one. Adobe Cloud is great I’ve read, with lots of functionality, but it has one major, and for me insuperable, drawback. Price. I’m more than willing to run with the minor quirks of open source, much of it being UI, and anyone can get used to that.
One bit of premium software I have paid for, and that's Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use 13, from 2013 I think. Not cheap, unless divided by 13 of course.
I belong to a camera club. The Adobe subscribers are like vegans; they tell you they have it within minutes of meeting. It’s a badge, telling everone they can afford it. None use it to its full extent. These are enthusiasts.
Vibe coding is great and some of the software packages produced are perfectly viable alternatives for specific functions but inherent in vibe coding is the seeds of its own demise. Others will copy it but won’t update and develop it, causing doubt and dissing open source. Darktable is an exception here.
After dumping Adobe I have used Affinity, this from the days of beta, that’s about a decade or so, and I still don’t use all the features. The current version is free, with AI subscriptions. For most photographers it’s not so much sufficient as ample.
I’ve always used free and open source software from the days of TBAG on my Amiga. I use Libre Office, Blender, Audacity, Darktable, Handbrake, as well as DaVinci Resolve, although I moved on from the free version to the paid-for Studio. But even that’s not subscription as it is a one-off payment. I’ve had it since v.17, a Covid gift. It is superb and released movies have been made using it, and many other have used its colour grading. Quality, and most of the Studio users could have got by with the free version. Probably I could.
I doubt I could have afforded all the paid-for alternatives to my apps list.
Open source and Free has earned its bad reputation, but there are some gems out there, and Affinity is one. Adobe Cloud is great I’ve read, with lots of functionality, but it has one major, and for me insuperable, drawback. Price. I’m more than willing to run with the minor quirks of open source, much of it being UI, and anyone can get used to that.
One bit of premium software I have paid for, and that's Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use 13, from 2013 I think. Not cheap, unless divided by 13 of course.
Derek Smith said:
One bit of premium software I have paid for, and that's Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use 13, from 2013 I think. Not cheap, unless divided by 13 of course.
Funnily enough voice recognition and text to speech is one area where there was a lot of great AI progress and some very good free models.It's all moved on a long way from where it was.
Distinct lack of imagination from most devs and users though for what to do with it.
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