🚀 go-pugleaf

James, I never used the word "monopoly" in my post. And that's because I don't feel that Adobe is a monopoly, at least not in the truest sense of the word. I also never said that Adobe is an "evil empire," nor do I necessarily think it.

As you noted in your example about the Pagemaker to InDesign transition, when Adobe feels like competing, it will, and put out an excellent product to boot. Adobe simply doesn't seem to feel the need to do so with Illustrator, because it was never in danger of losing its market share to another product. Pagemaker, however was increasingly being seen as a product for hobbyists, and QuarkXPress for professionals. Adobe knew they had to do something dramatic to change that situation, and just modernizing the Pagemaker code base wasn't enough. There is no such pressure from outside of Adobe when it comes to Illustrator. Corel and Xara aren't even in the same ballpark, and even Freehand, as far as market share, was in no danger of toppling Illustrator at any time that I know of.

Illustrator has always had "competitors," but none that have had enough market share to get Adobe worried. Heck, Adobe didn't even buy Macromedia to stifle competition for Illustrator, but to acquire Flash and Dreamweaver; the fact that it was killing its biggest Illustrator competitor was probably just seen as a bonus.

Yes, other software developers sell their products in bundles. I'm not critical of the bundle concept. However, from the standpoint of someone who is buying software, if one can only buy ONE bundle, it makes the most financial sense to purchase the Adobe bundle, because it is the only one that contains page layout, photo retouching, and illustration software that service bureaus won't have a hissy fit about when you supply them with files. Macromedia never had a page layout program in its offerings, therefore it could never be the "one" bundle that print designers would purchase, even before the company gave up its focus on Freehand.

As far as the user spending thousands of dollars to watch Illustrator play catch-up: I agree with you wholeheartedly. However, that's one of those hidden costs that bean counters never think about, and will never consider.

And yes, a company can be profitable without being the market leader. And just because a company is a market leader doesn't mean that the other companies don't exist. However, in the print world, market share can be important, because most print vendors (outside of some very specialized fields) tend to only support the big names in software. I can only imagine if I tried to send a Xara file or a Scribus file to a packaging printer. Just because I prefer a particular software package to create my work doesn't mean that I will be able to find printers that support it.

Adobe knows that. Until Xara or Corel (or whoever) starts taking some big bites out of Adobe's piece of the pie, then they will only do what they have been doing all along with Illustrator, which is pile more things on top of a poorly designed program. They will never spend the time or the effort to really assess how they can make a modern, best-in-class 2d drawing application. If I'm wrong about that assessment of Adobe, I will be happy to be wrong. But I don't think I am.