The consensus framing around Adobe is wrong. The market has spent two years debating whether Midjourney or Firefly or some yet-unnamed generative model will out-feature Photoshop. That is the wrong question. The right question is whether the category of human-directed creative production software retains its structural position in the content supply chain at all. The answer is increasingly no, and that answer is not cyclical.

The Category Is Being Hollowed Out, Not Competed Against

Adobe’s moat was never purely about features. It was about the irreducible requirement for a skilled human operator to sit between intent and output. A creative director needed Illustrator. A motion graphics artist needed After Effects. A print production manager needed InDesign. The software was expensive because the operator’s time was expensive, and the operator’s time was expensive because the skill was scarce. Adobe captured a tax on that scarcity.