Canva Acquires Serif and the Affinity Apps
Canva has taken a significant step toward attracting design professionals this week, acquiring Serif, makers of the Affinity suite of products. This includes Affinity Publisher (an InDesign competitor), Photo (a Photoshop competitor), and Designer (an Illustrator competitor).
The Affinity products have been increasingly attractive in recent years as their feature sets have matured, and because they have been sold at low price points with perpetual licensing, rather than forcing users into a subscription model. By contrast, Canva is a subscription-based service, with a single-user Pro license costing $120 per year. In their official statement on the acquisition, Serif claims there are no plans to extend the subscription model to the Affinity apps.
The acquisition makes sense because both companies have long emphasized the democratization of design tools by making them available to the largest number of people possible at reasonable costs. A Universal License to all three Affinity apps is currently on sale for $115 (regular price $165). Furthermore, each company has strengths in areas the other lacks. Canva is very strong in AI and web services. And Affinity offers pro-level tools, desktop and iPad apps, and an extensive user base of creatives.
However, both companies have been criticized for not supporting several key technologies that the professional design community requires:
- Extensibility: One of Adobe’s key strengths over the past 30 years has been the support of third-party developers building tools and workflows to automate production. Scripters, plug-in and add-on developers, and other IT providers have built robust ecosystems for designers and organizations.
- Accessibility: To date, neither Canva nor Affinity have released core accessibility features. This is a major problem for users, who are increasingly required by government regulations to build accessible documents.
- Prepress: Adobe basically invented prepress and print-ready workflows. As much as some want to believe that “print is dead,” that is far from true. It’s unclear whether Canva recognizes this.
- Server Solutions: Large scale publishing increasingly relies on template-driven, automated document construction, often run on servers, rather than on a desktop or laptop or phone.
It remains to be seen whether Canva will be able to—or is even interested in—developing their tools in these areas. Nevertheless, the acquisition of the Affinity suite should be seen as a “shot across the bow” of Adobe’s Creative Cloud battleship.
Will Adobe respond by doubling down on Adobe Express, their AI-based design-for-everyone service? Or will they devote more resources toward extending their dominance in pro-level tools for the most discerning of designers? Stay tuned.
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My own take on this is that Adobe could be its own worst enemy. InDesign increasingly gets less attention within Adobe in terms of updated features, performance, and reliability and especially in terms of print. Where’s the support for PDF 2.0, PDF/X-6, and PDF/VT (including PDF/VT-1 and PDF/VT-3)? (I would be very concerned that InDesign might end up suffering the same fate as FrameMaker!)
Adobe Express is really not (at least) currently a platform for developing serious content destined for print or even a combination of display and print. It has no real support for print publishing standards. All PDF output is sRGB, including black text. (And it has very much of a “walled-garden” – everything is in the cloud” aspect to it, similar to Apple’s world.)
“Print” is really not on the radar of Adobe’s current generation of management (although licenses for Adobe PostScript and the Adobe PDF Print Engine are extremely profitable for the company). There appears to be a concern that even mentioning “print” in public will cause Wall Street Anal-ysts to downgrade the stock as that of a “smokestack industry” with obsolete products and technology. Advocating for or even simply supporting print issues within Adobe can in fact be very, very career-limiting as a number of us can attest to!
I would be interested in hearing about that (the “very career-limiting” thing). Adobe’s message board for Acrobat Pro has upwards of 700 comments from extremely displeased professionals. Adobe appears to care not a jot. My comment to them was to remember what happened to QuarkXPress when they decided that were to big to listen to their customers.
Why doesn’t Adobe just use their lunch money to buy Canva and be done with it? Everything has a price. Anti-trust?
Neither Canva nor Canva’s potential acquisition, Serif, offer products or technology that either better or in some cases anywhere near as comprehensive as what Adobe already has. What they do provide is $$$$ competition.
Thus, anything that Adobe would do to try to “buy Canva” would certainly look like an effort to stifle competition. So yes, there would be serious antitrust considerations.
Sort of tangential remark, but with Adobe’s recent ongoing rollout of an almost unusable update to Acrobat Pro, I worry that they are going to destroy the whole line-up in favor of silly, supposedly phone-friendly applications. (when would you ever have wanted to enter 350 corrections to a book using a phone?) But Affinity does not have the features required for high-end publishing, which is very much alive!
I assume that you are referring to the “new Acrobat” so-called feature of desktop Acrobat Pro which is essentially the nth redo of the desktop Acrobat user interface.
As much as I (an 30-year user of the product) dislike this new interface, with the latest release of the product, as far as I can tell, all the Acrobat features of previous releases (including access to plug-ins) are now available in the new interface as well as the older one; that was absolutely not the case when they began rolling out the new interface last year. The biggest pain-in-the-tuchas about the new interface is that Adobe provided absolutely no “cheat sheet” showing how to access features from the older interface. (That’s what happens when you layoff all the technical writers to save costs!)
Unfortunately for those who really prefer the older interface, my bet would be that within a year or two at most, access to that interface will disappear.
Totally agree on all points. Perhaps Adobe’s shortcoming is our opportunity. CreativePro could produce that “cheat sheet” mapping the locations of features in the new Acrobat interface. Thanks, Dov!
Adobe is trending in a wrong direction because current senior management (especially, I would have to assume, at the board level) has lost sight of what made Adobe such a force to begin with. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke were passionate about making tools for graphics professionals. The key word is “professionals.” By any standards, Adobe produced industrial-grade tools under their leadership, and that is what won them the market.
The focus now seems to be on raw user numbers, market share, revenue, enterprise-level analytics, and corporate document flows. It clearly is not on graphics professionals.
There is no other way to explain why the most professional-focused tools are also the most neglected. There is no other way to explain why product teams are required to develop amateur-focused misfeatures while ignoring what professional users need and ask for. Development budget spent (squandered, really) on text-to-image generative AI for InDesign, which has no discernable professional use case, was exactly in line with the strategic focus of top management. (“AI all the things!” is the mantra-du-jour, apparently.)
In terms of what might happen to Adobe, a painful but more apt analog than Quark is Boeing. New brooms at the top of the Boeing org chart valued numbers over engineering quality, initiating a creeping deterioration that continued for two decades before it erupted into catastrophe in 2018. All the signs were there in the late ’90s, however.
When the entire working philosophy of top management changes, the effects ripple throughout the company.
To be fair to Shantanu and colleagues, they have extreme pressure from board members and shareholders who are unlikely to have the best interests of professionals in mind; their focus is numbers. Professionals, by definition, are a numerically small market by comparison with consumers. (It’s not just Adobe. Apple has been on the same consumer-focused kick since the first iPod, leading regularly to screams of frustration among professional customers.)
Professional tools and features, except for Photoshop, whose market is so large that it has budget and bandwidth to spare, are not a priority. XD was a tool of use only to professional developers: it’s gone. Dimension, a tool for professional designers: abandoned in favor of 3D artists, a market with a huge number of amateur users, just like Photoshop. (Substance Painter is an analog of Photoshop in the 3D world.) Adobe Express is almost exclusively focused on social media, another mass market.
We can all point to specific deficiencies in Adobe’s individual products and feature development, but I believe it is important to recognize that there is a broad, strategic error underlying the visible and annoying missteps.
I don’t know if we as customers can reverse the trend, given that it originates at management levels even the CEO can’t necessarily fight. But we can keep pointing it out, bringing it up in conversations, commenting on it in forums, calling it out for what it is: terrible corporate governance that undermines why Adobe exists and will ultimately destroy it. I have to believe that our voices are important, because the alternative is to do nothing, and that is always wrong.
Bravo, Alan! There’s not a nail in sight that you didn’t hit squarely on the head.
I would just add that we’re seeing a classic case of what happens when a company like Adobe becomes a monopoly. The products cease to matter because the customer has no choice. Fixing bugs and finishing half-baked features is a waste of money in this scenario. The only path to increased profit is marketing and new markets. Hence the silly obsession with AI-ing everything in sight and consumer-level tools, while core products like InDesign are left to drift and rot for years. By the way, this doesn’t seem to be working since Adobe’s stock price is down more than 25% from its peak while the overall market has been up. Though you could also argue it was insanely overvalued and I wouldn’t disagree.
This all makes me think back to the interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the corrosive effects of being a monopoly: driving out the people who understand how to make great products and replacing them with blowhards and know-nothings. It’s just the way capitalism works. Monopolies have no use for innovation and customer service.
https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4?feature=shared
The only way it gets better is to break the monopoly, either through government action or a rival representing a true threat entering the game. That’s why I always root for the Serifs (and even Quarks) of the world. Healthy competition and real choice make us all winners.