Thought experiment: What will Adobe look like in 2030?

I am a/an…

• Adobe investor.
• Consultant to Adobe who helped define the early days of Creative Cloud’s launch and existance.
• Educator, author, and consultant of Adobe software.
• Former creative software industry journalist (I started the first ever professional blog in the space).

From all of these perspectives I’m always looking toward the future of the creative professional industries, including, and especially, with our tools. And, as an amateur futurist, I often look forward from the past and present, envisioning what various aspects of life, business, technology, and the planet(s) might be like down the road. Looking only five years ahead is a small step, and one I thought perhaps a research-capable generative artificial intelligence might be able to handle–especially with such a widely covered subject as Adobe and its stock prices and software. So, I asked.

My prompt to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 utilizing research mode:

You are stock market-savvy technology writer with an expertise in Adobe. After researching Adobe's newsworthy actions and decisions over the last three years and the public and financial market responses to Adobe, including public perception on social media, write a 1,500 word article as if the current year is 2030 and you're looking back over the last 10 years of Adobe. Note growth or shrinkage you can predict and extrapolate from your research and describe the changes as if they have already happened. The article should be aimed at overall technology users, with a focus on software users who do or might use Adobe products.

Normally I would provide my own commentary on something like Claude’s resulting article below–there are some things I agree will likely happen, others I strongly disagree are probable–but for now, I’ll just leave my thoughts out of it. I won’t even note the hallucinations (factual errors) in Claude’s article.

–Pariah Burke

P.S. Someone asked me if AI wrote the above intro, citing that AI writing frequently uses em dashes. No, AI didn’t write it–it didn’t even tweak it. I have always used em dashes in my writing. Just look to any of my books or the hundreds of tutorials and articles written before the release of ChatGPT in 2023 for magazines and websites like Macworld, CreativePro.com, and InDesign Magazine.

Looking Back: Adobe’s Decade of Transformation (2020-2030)

Written in 2030

As we look back on Adobe’s turbulent decade from 2020 to 2030, it’s clear that the company experienced one of the most dramatic transformations in corporate software history. What began as cautious pandemic-era growth evolved into aggressive AI integration, pricing controversies, and ultimately a fundamental restructuring of how creative software companies operate. For those of us who lived through the “Adobe Wars” of the mid-2020s, the company that emerged in 2030 bears little resemblance to the one that entered the decade.

The Great Price Rebellion of 2025: A Turning Point

The watershed moment came in June 2025 with what became known as the “Great Price Rebellion.” Adobe’s Creative Cloud All Apps plan increased from $59.99 to $69.99 monthly, while introducing a limited “Standard” plan at $54.99. More dramatically, the Photography Plan jumped from $9.99 to $14.99 monthly for new subscribers, though Adobe wisely kept the annual prepaid option unchanged at $119.88.

What Adobe didn’t anticipate was how this 40% price increase for monthly photography subscribers would trigger the largest user exodus in software subscription history. The timing proved catastrophic—coming just one year after the traumatic Terms of Service controversy and amid growing AI integration fears. By late 2025, Adobe had lost approximately 8.2 million Creative Cloud subscribers, forcing the company into emergency damage control mode.

The rebellion wasn’t just about price—it was about trust. The community had already been fractured by the 2024 Terms of Service debacle, where a single tweet about content access garnered over 5 million views and 50,000 likes, with creators fearing Adobe would use their work to train AI models without consent. When combined with aggressive pricing, it created perfect storm conditions for organized resistance.

The AI Integration Backlash: When Innovation Breeds Resentment

Perhaps more damaging than pricing was the growing resentment toward Adobe’s AI-first strategy. While Adobe positioned Firefly as generating over 13 billion images by October 2024, many professional creators viewed the AI integration as an existential threat to their craft and livelihood.

The backlash intensified when users discovered that Adobe’s “ethically trained” AI had actually used competitor-generated images from Midjourney and DALL-E in its training data. This revelation shattered Adobe’s carefully constructed narrative about superior AI ethics and sparked what creative communities called the “AI Trust Crisis.”

Professional photographers and designers began organizing “AI-Free Creative” movements, with many major studios publicly committing to non-AI workflows by 2026. The irony wasn’t lost on observers: Adobe’s biggest competitive advantage—AI capabilities—had become a liability with its core user base.

The Market Response: Winners and Losers Emerge

The exodus created unprecedented opportunities for Adobe’s competitors. Affinity Suite, with its perpetual licensing model, saw subscriptions increase by 340% between 2025 and 2027. Canva, which had acquired Affinity in 2024, emerged as the primary beneficiary, reaching 200 million users by 2028 and achieving a $45 billion valuation.

Figma maintained its 40.65% market share in design software and, freed from Adobe’s acquisition threat, launched aggressive campaigns targeting dissatisfied Adobe users. DaVinci Resolve became the de facto alternative to Premiere Pro, with BlackMagic Design reporting that former Adobe Premiere users comprised 60% of their new customer base by 2027.

Adobe’s stock, which had already declined 40% from its 2021 peak, continued falling through 2026, reaching a low of $295—a 57% decline from its November 2021 high of $688. The company’s market capitalization dropped from $276 billion to $89 billion, falling out of the top 200 most valuable public companies.

The Corporate Restructuring: Desperate Measures

By early 2026, Adobe faced what CEO Shantanu Narayen later called “an existential moment.” The company announced a comprehensive restructuring that included:

Pricing Rollbacks: Adobe reversed the 2025 price increases and introduced new “Creator-Friendly” plans, including a return to perpetual licensing for core applications—something the company had sworn it would never do.

AI Opt-Out Options: Under pressure from the creative community and facing several class-action lawsuits, Adobe introduced comprehensive AI opt-out features, allowing users to completely disable AI functionality and ensure their content wasn’t used for model training.

Leadership Changes: The resignations of Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky and Chief Technology Officer Abhay Parasnis in late 2026 signaled a fundamental shift in company direction.

The Regulatory Reckoning

The Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed in June 2024 over subscription practices ultimately resulted in a $2.8 billion settlement in 2027—one of the largest consumer protection settlements in tech history. The FTC found that Adobe had intentionally designed cancellation processes to be difficult, with internal communications revealing executives comparing cancellation fees to “heroin for Adobe”.

European regulators went further, mandating that Adobe provide clear subscription cancellation options and eliminate early termination fees entirely. The regulatory pressure forced Adobe to fundamentally restructure its business model, moving away from the aggressive retention tactics that had defined the Creative Cloud era.

The Creative Community Strikes Back

Perhaps most significantly, the Adobe crisis catalyzed the formation of the Creative Software Alliance (CSA) in 2026—a consortium of professional creators, studios, and alternative software companies. The CSA developed open standards for creative file formats and cross-platform compatibility, breaking Adobe’s file format lock-in advantage.

Major entertainment studios including Pixar, Marvel Studios, and Netflix publicly committed to “Adobe-alternative workflows” by 2028, forcing the company to make its file formats more interoperable or risk losing enterprise customers entirely. The CSA’s annual “Adobe Alternatives Day” became a major industry event, with over 500,000 participants by 2029.

The Slow Recovery: Lessons Learned

Adobe’s recovery began in earnest in 2027 with the launch of “Creative Cloud Open”—a dramatically restructured offering that combined subscription and perpetual licensing options, provided complete AI opt-outs, and featured transparent pricing with no early termination fees.

The company also launched the “Trust Initiative,” hiring former critics as external advisors and implementing quarterly “Community Check-ins” where users could directly question executives about company policies. These sessions, initially hostile, gradually rebuilt some community confidence.

By 2028, Adobe had stabilized its subscriber base at 22 million Creative Cloud users—down from the 2025 peak of 34 million but representing a committed core of users who valued the company’s comprehensive ecosystem. Revenue had declined to $18.2 billion annually, but profit margins improved as the company eliminated costly customer acquisition and retention programs.

The Competitive Landscape in 2030

As we enter 2030, the creative software market looks radically different than it did in 2020. Adobe remains the largest player but with a market share of just 35%—down from nearly 60% in 2020. The market has fragmented into specialized tools, with users increasingly adopting “best-of-breed” approaches rather than all-in-one solutions.

Canva-Affinity controls 28% of the market, focusing on user-friendly design tools. Figma has evolved into a comprehensive design platform with 20% market share. DaVinci Resolve dominates video editing with 15% market share, while smaller players like Capture One, Luminar, and various open-source solutions fill niche markets.

Financial Aftermath: The New Adobe

Adobe’s financial transformation tells the story in numbers. Revenue growth, which had been consistently above 10% annually through 2024, turned negative in 2025 (-8%) and 2026 (-12%) before stabilizing. The company that had been worth $276 billion in 2021 was valued at $142 billion by late 2029—still substantial but no longer the creative software giant it once was.

Perhaps most tellingly, Adobe’s employee count dropped from 28,000 in 2025 to 19,000 by 2029, with the company focusing on core products rather than ambitious expansion plans. The failed Figma acquisition, which cost Adobe $1 billion in termination fees, came to symbolize the company’s misjudgment of both regulatory sentiment and user priorities.

Lessons for the Industry

Adobe’s decade offers sobering lessons for subscription-based software companies. The company’s experience demonstrates how quickly user sentiment can shift when pricing, AI integration, and trust issues converge. The Adobe Wars showed that even dominant market players with strong network effects can face existential challenges when they lose community trust.

For users, the decade proved the power of organized resistance. The creative community’s coordinated response—boycotts, alternative software development, regulatory pressure, and public campaigns—successfully forced a major corporation to fundamentally alter its business practices.

Looking Forward: Adobe in 2030

Today’s Adobe is a humbler, more community-focused company. The aggressive growth tactics and AI-first strategy that defined the mid-2020s have been replaced by careful consultation with user communities and conservative product development. The company still innovates, but no longer treats its user base as captive customers.

The Creative Cloud of 2030 offers genuine choice: users can subscribe, buy perpetual licenses, or use hybrid models. AI features are entirely optional and clearly labeled. Pricing is transparent, with no early termination fees or hidden costs. For many observers, it took near-collapse for Adobe to rediscover what made it great in the first place: serving creators rather than extracting value from them.

As we look ahead to the next decade, Adobe’s story serves as both cautionary tale and redemption narrative. The company that nearly lost everything found its way back by remembering a simple truth: in the creative software business, trust isn’t just important—it’s everything.