I think the negativity comes not from the fact that Adobe bought them, but that Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe.
Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service?
People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the time being.
I'm not sure I agree with "Aviary was the main, visible competition to Adobe." Yes, Aviary offers image editing apps for mobile, but that's a very competitive market. There are lots of image-editing and image-sharing apps for mobile.
Aviary's special sauce is something I don't think Adobe even has: a way for developers to quickly add a photo editor to their app or website (i.e. a photo editor SDK).
Until I saw your link, I thought everyone was referring to Skitch, the much more limited graphic editor. I was surprised that it was seen as competition.
Not sure I believe Aviary was the main visible competition to Adobe.
As far as photo editing software goes, I've been a hobbyist and part time photographer for a while, and I'm not sure I've ever heard of Aviary. When people recommend alternatives to Photoshop, I hear about Pixelmator, GIMP, Paintshop Pro, and a few others, but I don't remember ever hearing of Aviary.
To me, it doesn't seem like Aviary competes with Adobe directly at all. They're probably eating into the market of people who apply a few filters and upload to Flickr, but not many of those people use LightRoom or PhotoShop anyway. Even then, it's small fries compared to the pro/hobbyist Photographer market, and those people aren't going to use a web based editor because of IP issues and the inconvenience of uploading gigabytes of RAW files.
Also remember Adobe is huge and has products for document editing and video editing and other stuff. It doesn't look like Aviary does anything in those areas.
come on, that's just crazy, Aviary is no competition for Adobe. There are a million photo editing apps, and Aviary is one of them, but Adobe is the giant gorilla in the game, the go-to software for designers and photographers.
You must not have visited the Adobe forums in recent times. A sizable chunk of Creative Suite developers highly dislikes Creative Cloud (you can only get new versions via a subscription). So, many of them are probably on the lookout for alternatives.
As a longtime Lightroom user, I am happy that the most recent version can still be purchased as a standalone license. But they certainly seem to be steering people to the subscription model there as well.
I think you're making an analogous comparison, which is not necessarily the right one.
Aviary needs to compete not on features so much as audience. If Aviary can do 80% of what Adobe does for some % of users and it convinces those users to eschew their CC subscription, they are a competitor.
In other words, it's less the product and more the people.
Google and Apple get panned all the time for acquisitions, what are you talking about? Did you not see the thread when Apple announced they were buying Beats? Or every other Google-acquisition thread about users bemoaning the possible shuttering of the purchased service?
People aren't hating on this acquisition because they don't like Adobe (or Yahoo), they're hating on it because it means the end of competition for the time being.