markbvt

One has to wonder if this is going to let QuarkXPress recapture some of the pro market. Quark is still releasing new versions regularly, you can still buy a traditional perpetual license, and their license agreement has no hint of the troublesome, invasive tactics Adobe is adopting. And despite having fallen out of favor for the past 20 years, QuarkXPress is still an actual competitor for InDesign. Affinity Designer and (shudder) Canva just can't cut it for heavy production work.

I've had to keep up with QuarkXPress over the years because of one client still using it, and while it's not as nice to use as InDesign, it is very capable.

rob53 said:

Sounds to me like you're saying (admitting) it's a monopoly. There are other ways to do what Adobe's products do but for whatever reason, they've been able to knock out every other challenger. Now they can charge whatever they want and people/companies/government/etc. will have to pay it. Sounds like what Microsoft was caught doing. 

It's not a monopoly; QuarkXPress is still hanging on in certain segments. But the reason for Adobe's dominance in the market is the fact that no one else has come up with a product that's as good (admittedly, InDesign's takeover of most of the page layout segment also had a lot to do with its being bundled with Illustrator and Photoshop back in the first few versions of Creative Suite -- so when smaller design studios, etc, bought Illustrator and Photoshop, they got InDesign along with it, and therefore felt no great need to keep paying Quark for updates).

At this point Adobe is the 800lb gorilla -- but there's a good reason for it. They've been constantly developing an excellent product that gives professionals from graphic design through prepress the tools they need to get their work done. As of yet, all the challengers I've seen have been unable to match the capabilities of Adobe's products. If Affinity can do it, I applaud them and wish them well -- but I'm skeptical. 

What I have no doubt of, though, is that some more casual users will find the pricing a lot more attractive than Adobe's, and we're going to start receiving files produced by Affinity Publisher and will soon see whether they present issues or not.