Adobe

Adobe is told as a visionary jump from creative tools to a marketing empire. It was never a leap — it was a disciplined chain of standard-extension moves, from PostScript in 1985 to PDF in 1993 to a $1.8B analytics bet in 2009, each one anchored to a workflow it already owned.

The legend says Adobe bravely killed its cash cow overnight in May 2013. It didn't. Creative Cloud had shipped a year earlier, perpetual CS6 sold until 2014, and the CFO had warned Wall Street revenue would drop back in 2011. The real self-disruption test is happening now.

Adobe agreed to pay $20B for Figma in 2022 and walked away in 2023 owing a $1B breakup fee. The deal didn't die because regulators guessed at harm. It died because Adobe had already written the case against itself.

In June 2024 a single tweet about Adobe's terms of service hit 5 million views and convinced creators their files were AI training fodder. The clause was months old, and Firefly was never trained on user content. The damage was real anyway — and that's the lesson.

Adobe's creative-tools moat looks unassailable: ~37 million subscribers, $13.85 billion in Creative ARR, no rival above 15% share. But the $1 billion it paid to abandon Figma reveals exactly where the wall has a gap.

In 2013 Adobe stopped selling Photoshop and started subscribing it - revenue cratered from $4.4B to $4.06B before it climbed. The pivot is taught as visionary. The 2024 FTC complaint over hidden 50% cancellation fees suggests the real product was always the lock-in.