Temple 8 Research
AI Buildout, Macro & Energy Infrastructure Research
Adobe is hard to want to own after an open-source project reimplemented its full software suite, as @math_fournity reports. x.comÂ
Adobe is completely cooked: its low P/E is low for a reason, and there are plenty of better companies to buy. @StockSavvyShay notes that Anthropic's new Claude Design lets users create prototypes, slides and one-pagers by talking to Claude, pushing into territory associated with Figma and Adobe without requiring much design experience. x.comÂ
Adobe's professional switching costs make fears of a one-shot replacement look arbitrary. Users would have to retrain for years and migrate established production systems across its many apps; the comparison with Duolingo's streaks and virtual badges is about inconsistent disruption fears, not necessarily a bearish call on Duolingo. x.com x.comÂ
AI design tools from Anthropic are eroding Adobe's terminal value. Per @StockSavvyShay, Anthropic is reportedly preparing a design tool that creates presentations, websites, landing pages and products from natural-language prompts, which helps explain pressure on Figma and Adobe shares. x.comÂ
Adobe is among the SaaS companies at risk because AI agents don't care about UX/UI, and SaaS businesses that rely on their interfaces are toast. Some were top SaaS names in 2021, before the ZIRP-era SaaS collapse. x.com x.comÂ
Adobe's moat may be that no artists want to build their own Photoshop or Premiere, even as everyone in finance thinks they can vibe code Bloomberg and has the money to try. x.comÂ
Adobe could eventually be dead as intelligence becomes an abundant commodity and anyone can edit their own videos and photos. Claude, OpenAI and open-weight models such as Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek are in a price fight to zero, so years of developer work no longer form a moat. The new moats are trust, distribution and hard-to-get data. x.comÂ
Adobe is falling despite growing revenue and earnings because AI is disrupting its core image- and PDF-editing products, and that kind of disruption simply takes time to show up in the numbers. Newspapers after the internet and BlackBerry after the iPhone followed the same path. Anyone using AI to edit images or PDFs can see it. x.comÂ
Adobe is expanding the top of its funnel with freemium users, now over 100M and growing 70% a year, aiming to convert them into paying customers and move into a segment historically served largely by Canva. That strategy should bear fruit over time. x.comÂ
Adobe faces an existential AI question: if anyone can edit an image or generate a video with a text prompt, what is Photoshop for? Image and video generation is changing faster than almost any field but code, threatening the complex interfaces Creative Cloud was built on, and Adobe relies on Google, OpenAI, Midjourney and others for frontier models. Canva and startups are attacking pieces of the suite. Pixel-perfect editing and Firefly's $250M ARR, up 75% a quarter, are the bull case. x.comÂ