Every incumbent tries to make the new thing a feature of the old thing, and every incumbent has read the Clayton Christensen ‘Disruption’ book and wants to make sure they make the jump. Adobe made a very successful shift to subscription SaaS in the last decade, and now it’s trying the same with generative AI, launching a de novo image generation product in Firefly and adding generative features to Photoshop.
The more generally important part of this, I think, is the move to add interface, control and product to the prompt: instead of typing 50 words into a box and waiting to see what you get, there are options and switches to give you some control. Stepping up another level again, I think these kinds of features, like most automation and indeed like Photoshop, will produce more employment, not less: making these kinds of workflows easier and faster will lead to more people doing it.
However, the other side of a platform shift is that while the incumbents make it a feature, new companies create entirely new tools that are native to the new possibilities, and unbundle the use cases one by one. Figma is not a web version of Photoshop (and Adobe is trying to buy it, which may or not be allowed by competition authorities), and there will be generative AI equivalents.
The more generally important part of this, I think, is the move to add interface, control and product to the prompt: instead of typing 50 words into a box and waiting to see what you get, there are options and switches to give you some control. Stepping up another level again, I think these kinds of features, like most automation and indeed like Photoshop, will produce more employment, not less: making these kinds of workflows easier and faster will lead to more people doing it.
However, the other side of a platform shift is that while the incumbents make it a feature, new companies create entirely new tools that are native to the new possibilities, and unbundle the use cases one by one. Figma is not a web version of Photoshop (and Adobe is trying to buy it, which may or not be allowed by competition authorities), and there will be generative AI equivalents.
— Benedict Evans