It’s clear that many of you still don’t like Adobe’s Creative Cloud model, but its here to stay and Adobe’s latest earnings report shows you why.
You wouldn’t be the first person in the photography industry to be somewhat surprised by the incredible financial numbers published by Adobe in their Q2 earnings report. The company has been facing harsh criticism from photographers over their handling of Lightroom CC and the overall quality of the updates coming with the Creative Cloud. But it seems that this issue of public perception of late has not hurt Adobe at all in their bottom line, in fact, the company is doing better than ever.
In their financial reports for Q2 2018 Adobe posted a quarterly revenue of 2.2Billion, yes that is billion with a B. This represents an incredible 24% year-over-year growth for the company when compared to where they were at this point last year. That is impressive, to say the least, but the question that this really brings up for me is this: If Adobe is doing as well as they are, why on earth is Lightroom such a mess for so many photographers?
Clearly, this is not a money problem, Adobe can’t use that excuse after posting the sort of record numbers that they have. So, if it is not a money issue, what is the delay? Why is it such a tough nut for Adobe to crack? Lightroom is just about the default photo processor in the industry, with every other option on the market miles behind in terms of user numbers. So with all of this demand for a stable, well-performing software package, plenty of money to throw at the problem, and all of that it just doesn’t make sense to me that the company hasn’t gotten this problem fixed.
Sure, one could make the argument that Lightroom only accounts for a small, small piece of the Adobe financial puzzle, so priority is going into areas of more revenue potential. You would not be wrong in that statement, nor illogical in that assessment of it. However, to me it is still a black mark on the Adobe report card, that one of their most highly used and industry-leading products consistently fails to meet the expectations of its primary users.
But who knows, maybe this is not a money or resource allotment issue. Maybe there is some underlying problem with Lightroom’s core design that is limiting it’s potential, maybe I am missing something here.
It should be noted, to be fair, that Adobe has done a fair bit of work improving Lightroom over the last year. Some of it has had more of an effect than others, and a lot of it didn’t have a great start out of the gate; But from where I am sitting it is safe to say that Lightroom is certainly in a better place this year than it was last year, which really, when it comes down to it, is the promise that Adobe made with Creative Cloud.
It would be nice, however, to see Lightroom finally ‘fixed’ once and for all so that we can get past this culture of negativity and back to what we should all be doing in the first place – editing our awesome images. Come on Adobe, we see that you have the money, use it and give us the Lightroom that we deserve.