SAN JOSE, Calif., September 7 — The shift is unmistakable. Adobe is pulling the plug on Creative Suite, ending an 18-year run that began with Creative Suite 1 in 2003 and closing a chapter that defined professional design for a generation. The decision lands as generative AI tools from OpenAI and a wave of startups rewrite what creative software looks like — and what it costs to make.
The San Jose, California-headquartered company is leaning hard into its cloud subscription model and into AI, with its Firefly generative model now the centerpiece of that bet. The pivot had been building for years.
Firefly entered beta in March 2023, and Adobe has poured resources into weaving machine intelligence into the workflows it once sold as boxed software.
A founder-led legacy, remade for AI
Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, and its product line reads like a timeline of modern design. Illustrator arrived in 1987, Photoshop followed in 1990, and InDesign in 1999 — tools that built entire industries. Ending Creative Suite updates signals, plainly, that the era of the perpetual license is over.
The financials behind that pivot are sizable. Adobe reported fiscal 2024 revenue of $21.5 billion, with digital media — the segment housing Creative Cloud — bringing in $15.8 billion.
Those numbers explain why the company is willing to walk away from a product family with deep sentimental and institutional weight.
The Figma that almost was
Adobe’s AI posture didn’t start with Firefly. In 2022 the company announced a deal to acquire Figma, the collaborative design platform — a move widely seen as a bet on the future of cloud-native, AI-friendly creative work. Regulators got in the way.
The deal was abandoned in 2023 amid antitrust pushback, and Adobe went back to building. For the millions of designers still clinging to legacy installs, the message is operational: Creative Cloud is the only path forward, and AI features are no longer optional extras.
Subscription pricing keeps recurring revenue flowing, and Firefly-powered tools — generative fill, generative expand, text-to-image — increasingly define the user experience. The competitive backdrop is sharper than ever. AI-native design platforms keep launching, and OpenAI’s image and video tools have pulled everyday users out of the traditional creative stack.
Adobe’s bet is that a deeply integrated, AI-first Creative Cloud can hold the line against a fragmented field of upstarts.
What to watch next
Watch this space for how aggressively Adobe bundles Firefly into the Creative Cloud tier structure, and whether pricing shifts to reflect the AI compute baked into every workflow. The bigger trend underneath: the creative software market is splitting between AI-native challengers and incumbents retrofitting themselves in real time. Adobe just declared which side it’s on.
