The software isn't the whole product

It’s strange.

After years of wishing there was a one-time purchase version of Adobe Lightroom… a bunch of open-source alternatives have popped up over the past month, free, with largely comparable quality.

The weird thing is, I still pay for — and use — Lightroom.

It revealed something I hadn’t really thought about until the alternative showed up: the software isn’t the whole product.

The software is part of the product. The other part is the 43 years Adobe has been in business, assuring me they’ll still be around tomorrow. Another part is in knowing they’re financially incentivized to keep going with the product, and so it will likely still be supported tomorrow, like it is today.

The free vibecoded alternative that does most of what I need out of an app I use as a hobbyist, seems pretty good… but I don’t know if it’ll still be supported tomorrow. I don’t know if it’ll receive care ongoing, by photographers as well as just LLM nerds. I don’t know if the bugs will be worked out, or if a breaking change will download one day that damages my library or, worse, my photos. There’s no way to know, not today.

The solution for Adobe is to stand by its pedigree, and rebuild its reputation with creatives, so that they’re glad to align with the brand again. The software isn’t the whole product, and there’s an open goal for them here.

The solution for the new open-source alternatives is to stand by its software, and demonstrate a level of care and commitment that goes far beyond the typical “slop” narrative. Relationship-wise, there’s an open goal here until (or if) Adobe makes a move.

Sadly, it seems more likely that Adobe won’t make that move.

But it’s nevertheless interesting to see: the software isn’t the whole product. It never was. And as software becomes cheaper, it still isn’t. And it likely never will be.