Warnock, who died Saturday, was one of the leading computer scientists of his era and co-founder in 1982 of Adobe Inc.
Adobe is… kind of evil? He made the world a better place? Maybe at first.
The amount of creativity Adobe products unleashed upon the world is staggering. Decades ago they were groundbreaking. Just about any piece of media you have ever seen from the past 35+ years has been touched by them in some way.
The Adobe we know now was not the Adobe of back then. Just like the Apple of 1985 is not anything like the Apple we have today. Back then it was about actually developing useful technology, and not just coming up with innovative ways to squeeze every last dollar from every possible customer for the same bloated and tired piece of software.
Back then you had a problem (eg. people wanted to create artistic stuff), and then you had a solution (powerful software to help you). Now software like that is everywhere, so the only way for companies to “compete” is by adding bloat and jacking up the price. Hence the Adobe we see today, full of pointless crap and complex licensing schemes.
A vehemently disagree with any statement that claims PDF made the world better.
OK, I can be a little more nuanced, the many ways PDFs are used today, for anything but printing something, are making the world a worse place.
PDFs are a pain in the fucking ass.
