Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen

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."

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.

> 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.