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721 points ralusek | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.248s | source
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ryandrake ◴[] No.41870217[source]
I'm making some big assumptions about Adobe's product ideation process, but: This seems like the "right" way to approach developing AI products: Find a user need that can't easily be solved with traditional methods and algorithms, decide that AI is appropriate for that thing, and then build an AI system to solve it.

Rather than what many BigTech companies are currently doing: "Wall Street says we need to 'Use AI Somehow'. Let's invest in AI and Find Things To Do with AI. Later, we'll worry about somehow matching these things with user needs."

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crazygringo ◴[] No.41870929[source]
This feels extremely ungenerous to the Big Tech companies.

What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"? You figure out the 10 that users find really valuable, another 10 that will be super-valuable with improvement, and eventually drop the other 80.

Especially when if Microsoft tries something and Google doesn't, that suddenly gives Microsoft a huge lead in a particular product, and Google is left behind because they didn't experiment enough. Because you're right -- Google investors wouldn't like that, and would be totally justified.

The fact is, it's often hard to tell which features users will find valuable in advance. And when being 6 or 12 months late to the party can be the difference between your product maintaining its competitive lead vs. going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 123 -- then the smart, rational, strategic thing to do is to build as many features as possible around the technology, and then see what works.

I would suggest that if Adobe is being slower with rolling out AI features, it might be more because of their extreme monopoly position in a lot of their products, thanks to the stickiness of their file formats. That they simply don't need to compete as much, which is bad.

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swatcoder ◴[] No.41871026[source]
> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?

For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.

There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.

Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.

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crazygringo ◴[] No.41871101[source]
Think about the other side though -- if the tool you've learned and rely on goes out of business because they didn't innovate fast enough, it's a whole lot worse for you now that you have to learn an entirely new tool.

And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.

But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.

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1. jmb99 ◴[] No.41874285[source]
Back in the olden days (10 years ago), when you bought software, you could actually keep using it indefinitely. Doesn’t matter if the company went bankrupt, if you like using Logic Pro 7 and it works with your equipment you can kept using it. I know people who only recently moved off of OS 9 - they were using creative software for over 25 years, it did what they needed it to do so they kept using it. I still know at least one person who uses Office for Mac 98 to this day on an iMac G3; it’s their only computer, but it still works and they have backups of their important documents, so why pay money to switch to an unfamiliar computer, OS, software?

This modern idea of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll like it” ruins that of course, but if someone bought CS6 they can still be using it today. If adobe went bankrupt 5 years ago they could still be legally using it today (they’d have to bypass the license checks if the servers go down, which might be illegal in the US, though). If adobe goes bankrupt tomorrow and I have a CC subscription, I can’t legally keep using photoshop after the subscription runs out.