Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
mxschumacher | on: Anthropic IPO
a big move into end-user software would mean that they have to compete heavily with their own largest customers. The economics of offering SaaS are also under meaningful pressure and don't warrant anywhere near the valuation that is being suggested
mattbrewsbytes | parent | next
The biggest moat with applications like MS Office is compatibility. Sharing a slide deck or spreadsheet with others is a simple decision, you know they have it or have software that can read/write it.

I don't get the need to have Anthropic build their custom versions of MS Office apps, I can tell Claude to generate a word doc from a wiki page and it does a pretty damn good job. Anthropic's statistical median level of software that they had Claude create isn't going to replace Office apps to the point where companies cancel/stop renewing their MS Office subscriptions/licenses.

The other element is trust. Do end users trust their data in Anthropic's systems? A lot of people get creeped out when they search for content from one device in their household and then nearly instantaneously they start seeing ads from other devices on the same topic. How creepy will AI get if it starts consuming all your docs, spreadsheets, personal finance info, emails, etc.?

boringg | root | parent | next
I beg to differ I already am stopping using MS office recently but that's mainly because I really dislike how they lock up the apps if your late on your annual payment. It's a grating value capture model. I'm sure I will have to get back to it at some point but in the meantime google is providing great optionality and I don't have a concern that the software stack has glaring security concerns.

On the trust thing - I don't trust anthropic and I don't think MS has been a great steward over the years either.

steveBK123 | root | parent
The moat of backwards compatibility and plugins is why MS Office has survived decades of competitors without any appreciable loss of market share.

It's hard to see Anthropic replacing it, and even if so - why bother, the revenue is miniscule. They need 100 MS Offices for the compute contracts to pencil out.

abirch | parent | next
End-user software is going to be under a lot of pressure. If you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google: you can easily copy products or integrate ideas into their platform. I see companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle having to downsize significantly to stay profitable. Having said that, my in-laws still pay for an AOL email so I don't think their cashflow is going to zero soon.
mxschumacher | root | parent | next
Adobe seems to be in a tough spot, because so much of the lock-in is client side, I think Salesforce is fairly well protected, it's just so impossibly difficult to remove once a company has fully adopted it. Similar to the staying power of the ERPs of Oracle and SAP.
numlock86 | root | parent | next
It's the same really. There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. Even more aren't going to change much, at least for their enterprise key customers. This is not only the case for Adobe, but many others as well, e.g. MS office is still a thing these days, and so are things like 3Ds Max or Maya, albeit having many compatible cheaper or even free alternatives. It's not so much about features, pricing or even stability. It's about customer support. Do I want to ask an LLM and test my luck or write a GitHub issue and cross my fingers that someone will read it within the next weeks? No, I will pick up my phone or write a mail and get a response within hours if not minutes.
erwincoumans | root | parent | next
I ask my llm to write custom software and love the freedom to customize it to my needs. Today I do a presentation on Ubuntu with a new "Presenter" app that works offline, runs 100% in CUDA on GPU and streams videos, starts in 2 seconds, lets me demo live robotics policies in 3D simulations and Opus 5.5 wrote it yesterday. This may sound very unusual, but I think it will be common in the future: moats disappear one by one.
giladd | root | parent
With no feedback loop and reasonable token use?
abirch | root | parent | next
I would say that Apple's Create Studio can move toward feature parity faster with Adobe. My point if you're not a platform provider it's going to be harder to make a profit.
tonyedgecombe | root | parent | next
The risk for Adobe isn’t that we replace their software with some AI generated alternative. It’s that we bypass that class of software altogether and have an AI do the work.
lukan | root | parent | next
"There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. "

And yet me and quite some others still yearn for a flash alternative. There never was one.

diydsp | root | parent
Interesting point that challenges the limits of LLMs!

Any of us could vibe code flash now. How to coordinate it as a dev ecosystem of designers and users?

Does it make sense for everyone to JITVibe presentation apps like the person above? Maybe we'll evolve to branding.

lukan | root | parent
"Any of us could vibe code flash now. "

Surely not just prompting like this and it will one shot it. The usefulness of the flash authoring tool, was it was battle tested and polished.

But I did gave it a shot to took up developement again of abandoned www.wickeditor.com (a web reimplementation of flash). Good results, but limited time and energy for that right now.

Forgeties79 | root | parent
The big problem is Photoshop. I have no love for Adobe, I proudly moved my department off of all Adobe products a few years ago. I am a big fan of open source solutions and I am always impressed at what the GIMP team (and some others) have accomplished.

But…

Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.

Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.

Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.

jcomp | root | parent | next
I'm not sufficiently skilled with Photoshop to gauge how well this replaces it, but you may be interested in this supposed clean-room reimplementation of Photoshop: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
Forgeties79 | root | parent
Heard about this! Haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. I’m sure once I have an actual project that needs me to roll up my sleeves with Photoshop I’ll give it a shot. I probably should have mentioned it in my original comment as a possible option
intrikate | root | parent
Not a graphic designer, so, truly asking out of curiosity: what are the QoL things and essential features in Photoshop? I've been slumming it with GIMP for years now and not felt anything very obviously missing, but again I'm not a pro.
Forgeties79 | root | parent
Compatibility issues, which can be a huge deal partially due to near-vendor lock in. If you historically been on Photoshop, bringing your working/former projects into another software is not easy, which matters because revisiting work is common.

Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust, and a client simply isn’t going to accept that you won’t do something that Photoshop could do quickly because your alternate program can’t do it or does it with a lot more effort. That’s the reason I ultimately dropped Final Cut!

abirch | root | parent
AI is pretty amazing for migrating. source: I'm using Claude to replace a large Tableau ecosystem. What would have taken years is now taking months.
loading story #50468972
brazukadev | root | parent | next
> If you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google: you can easily copy products or integrate ideas into their platform

This argument doesn't hold water. Google tried like no one else to have a chat app and it failed miserably more than a handful of times. Same for social networks.

abirch | root | parent
Sorry, I was referring to "end-user software" which in my mind is something that people pay for directly.
mono442 | root | parent
Adobe creative suite is $70/m. From most businesses perspective it's not something worth looking for cheaper alternatives and the alternatives has existed for a long time now.
grahamlee | parent
now imagine that said customer/competitors have been uploading/generating their source code, problem reports, marketing collateral, and other IP _to the LLM company_ for the last few years.