Cloud welcome back to Xara
It's actually bitter sweet, good to know that the old names are still here but also it seems that not all is well with xara either, if only there were companies who appreciated their loyal customers, luckily we live at a time with so many startups, I have found that there is an alternative for everything and these new companies (initially at least) are happy to look after their new customers. There seems to be a lot of this whole 'prototyping' software, adobe has xd which is for prototyping websites and then handing over to a developer to 'code' I don't know which world these companies are living in but pretty much every developer is using wordpress and page builders and through the use of fairly basic css and plugins able to create pretty much every type of website. I think they panicked about the offerings from companies such as wix or weebly which allow the layman to design a website for their own business, but we have noticed that a lot of these businesses are now looking for professional web design companies to fix the problems that they are getting (SEO etc). Adobe have decided to concentrate on spark, which allows VERY basic websites to try and get into this consumer market. They have also made the decision to buy Magento, which doesn't make any sense at all, the vast majority of ecommerce sites are using woocommerce and magento is overkill for most people, there's no doubt that magento is infinitely more scaleable than woocommerce but that's for the really big companies.

Xara, Adobe et all need to take a breath and realise that they don't have monopolies, adobe's print offerings (indesign) are dying because the print industry is dying (we closed down that business a while back, as have a lot of our competitors and suppliers - the margins are tiny), photoshop has a LOT of competition, including many free ones and illustrator too is fighting online tools which can do just as well. As for subscription (adobe creative cloud); I thought it was a good deal at first, with promises of almost monthly updates, but that fell by the wayside and what they called major updates were a few lines of code to be able to change the UI, because we have move to strictly web development only we are able to use free, open source software to get the job done, Wordpress combined with a free theme such as oceanwp or astra and Elementor page builder plus a handfull of free plugins is all we need, the days of paying to create websites or design logos, illustrations or for print are over. Many companies are doing amazing on the freemium model; a free offering and a premium one for those who need that little bit extra, perhaps xara could do the same.

We as consumers need to wake up and stop being gimps. These companies are nothing without us and they know it, even though they don't admit it to themselves. Loyalty is a two way street.