No one schmoe working by himself — or even a few schmoes working together — is going to replace that. The GIMP folks have come the closest (after 10 years of work), but even that isn't really a Photoshop replacement in anybody's mind.
I never meant to imply it had to be one schmoe. It can be a team of schmoes. And while I'm sure the GIMP people are quite talented, they don't have nearly the rich set of tools that the average Mac OS X developer does. The GIMP folks had to start from scratch in a lot of respects.
It can be done.
Even if you did write an app that was as good as Photoshop for, say, a subset of Photoshop's tasks, I wonder if there would be much of a market. Most pros would still use Photoshop, I imagine.
Give up and go home, then?
I'm not saying it's easy, but it is worth doing. Certainly easier than writing an operating system, and we have more of those than we have Photoshops.
Maybe one of Adobe's biggest strategic advantages in this area is everyone assumes it's too hard to be worthwhile. A Photoshop replacement wouldn't have to do everything Photoshop does. Aim for the sweet spot. A lot of of Photoshop users rarely work on something destined for print, so focus on creating a 2D design tool for digital media and sidestep all the DTP stuff.
by Scott Stevenson — Nov 20
I never meant to imply it had to be one schmoe. It can be a team of schmoes. And while I'm sure the GIMP people are quite talented, they don't have nearly the rich set of tools that the average Mac OS X developer does. The GIMP folks had to start from scratch in a lot of respects.
It can be done.
Even if you did write an app that was as good as Photoshop for, say, a subset of Photoshop's tasks, I wonder if there would be much of a market. Most pros would still use Photoshop, I imagine.
Give up and go home, then?
I'm not saying it's easy, but it is worth doing. Certainly easier than writing an operating system, and we have more of those than we have Photoshops.
Maybe one of Adobe's biggest strategic advantages in this area is everyone assumes it's too hard to be worthwhile. A Photoshop replacement wouldn't have to do everything Photoshop does. Aim for the sweet spot. A lot of of Photoshop users rarely work on something destined for print, so focus on creating a 2D design tool for digital media and sidestep all the DTP stuff.