Rebuilding the app is not the work

Great news, everyone. Photoshop has been rebuilt over a weekend. Jira too, about a hundred times. Decompiled, cloned, pushed to GitHub, free for all, and the comments agree: see, super easy, you don't need all that expensive software anymore, you can just build it yourself.

Can you though? I find this wrong in a lot of ways. On the one hand, yes, it's good when monopolies get broken up, or lock-in systems get cracked open a little. If a free clone makes the incumbent sweat about pricing or finally ship that one feature, great. I'm not defending Adobe here.

But at the same time, it's presented as if the one act, the creation of the initial software, were the whole work. As if building the thing is the whole job and everything after is a footnote.

It's a bit like going to a restaurant, ordering a dish, and then saying that instead of paying 29 euros for it, you could cook it at home for four. Which is true, and also not the point.

What doesn't get considered, or what I would ask the people who do this:

• Are you committed to maintaining this? If I start working with it as a user now, is it still going to be there in two years, or will it have become uninteresting for you by then, because the next thing has been built?
• Are you doing user research? Are you thinking about how to develop the product further?
• Are you fixing bugs? Are you answering feature requests from users, who will of course have exactly the same problems with this software as they had with the proprietary one?
• Are you already thinking about a next version, about the jobs to be done this software is supposed to solve?
• How does it scale? How does it work with multiple users? How does a whole company switch to it and work on the same shared state?

All of that seems very short-sighted to me.

If someone seriously starts a business and offers an alternative to a piece of software, and commits to making it their thing, then great. I would trust that. But it often feels to me like one-off showing off, meant to say "hey, I can rebuild your software", without any intention of actually solving a problem.

So everything changed, and nothing changed. Building software got cheap, almost free. But design was never about building the thing. Design is solving problems, for real people, over time. The clone shows that you can build. It doesn't show that you care about the problem. And that part still costs what it always did.