The Anti-Adobe Coalition Is Here (zakelfassi.com)

A loose but powerful "anti-Adobe coalition" has quietly formed: designers and creators are migrating from Adobe’s bundled, proprietary suite to a network of specialist, interoperable tools—Figma for UI and design-as-platform, Descript for text-driven audio/video editing, Midjourney for generation, Notion for docs, plus Framework laptops running DHH’s Omarchy for a curated developer OS. Key events accelerated this shift: the EU blocking Adobe’s attempted Figma acquisition, Figma’s public-market surge and open format/API work, Descript’s reinvention of editing (edit audio by editing text, export standard MP4s plus transcripts), and DHH’s Omarchy bringing Rails-style opinionated defaults (Neovim, ripgrep, fzf, zoxide, native Docker, keyboard-first UX) to repairable Framework hardware—yielding faster test runs and no VM overhead. The significance is structural: lock-in from proprietary file formats and monolithic bundles is eroding as tools publish specs and expose APIs, enabling programmable creative pipelines and tiny, best-of-breed stacks that interoperate. Technically this favors open formats, service-to-service APIs, AI-first features targeted at non-expert workflows, and predictable, documented developer environments (the “median expert” OS). The result: faster onboarding, reproducible workflows, declining subscription inertia, and a likely five-year enterprise adoption arc as new generations insist on modular, opinionated toolchains rather than one-size-fits-all suites.