You and I, we go back a long way. When you killed my ex, Aldus, I didn’t complain. Progress demands casualties.

I get misty-eyed thinking about the early days. Heady nascent days of DTP desktop publishing. I was even young enough to loudly brag that I had never touched Quark before.

We had the best times. Oh, the sheer gall of Adobe Type Manager! What a bossy little thing that was, an extension was what we used to call it. Shuttling typefaces here and there as if they were cattle. ATM™ really smoothed over those jaggedy PostScript types and showed them who was boss.

I was even there for Flash. For a brief, chaotic moment, everything moved and nobody cared if anything worked. I will always recall it fondly as the Golden Age of Webdesign. Websites were so audacious, salacious, so indulgent, so not-giving-a-rat’s-ass about functionality nor the User. My favourite one from that era is lecielestbleu.com. The url is pure poetry. Its utility was never questioned. It existed for the sole purpose of letting the visitor toss very lanky, long-limbed giraffes into a cloudless seafoam sky.

On hindsight, Flash was so precisely named too. You always had a way with names, Adobe. It’s one of my favourite things about you. It was over in a flash. What felt like the future of the Internet, was just a blip on the timeline. Flash was murdered and everyone is a suspect.

In 2010, you moved out to the cloud. You called it Creative Cloud. You didn’t ask. You just decided, one day, that you were “moving out.” I tried to be supportive.

You kept dangling new shiny things in front of me. And I kept reaching for them: Adobe Bridge, Fresco, XD, the list goes on and on. Each one more seductive than the previous. And if I’m being honest, I never worked with a large enough team to need something like Bridge.

Applications that ultimately didn’t last. It was frustrating, I won’t lie. I was constantly learning how to use new software only to find them discontinued. Still, I never blamed you for anything.

But your proclivity for app progeny spiraled unchecked. I loved that for you. After all, you are Adobe, and if You Can Dream It, You Should absolutely Do It. But as your suite of applications got more and more bloated, so too did your subscription fees. I was paying maintenance for quite a few more children than I bargained for. Most of them I don’t even use.

So we did a little dance every year. Where I would threaten to leave and you would half my fees. It felt so romantic. I thought it was your love language. But this year, when I returned for our little charade, you told me, in no uncertain terms, that you didn’t want to dance anymore.

That hurt. A lot. I decided to see if you were bluffing.

You weren’t.

I figured you must be feeling the pressure from pleb-favourites like Figma and Canva. It is a new kind of hell. If I try to think of those two at the same time, the phrase “I can’t even” comes to mind. Adobe Express is so much better. Right? Oh okay, maybe not $90/month better.

You gave us Generative Fill and Firefly. But all Wall Street wanted to know was, how do you monetize that? Monetize that? All you do is monetize. You’ve been at it since 2010, when you eased us onto your subscription model. Now it is a codependency I can’t get out of.

I tell anyone who would listen that Wall Street doesn’t understand Adobe. Nor designers. What I’m afraid of is that the market doesn’t need to understand anything. It has seen two moves ahead and has already priced in our collective demise.