But how many people have $500 (or whatever) for illustrator or $2000 for the whole CS suite?

You should heed your own advice and think it through.

How ironic would that be?

The suite is awesome BTW keep up the great work.

Think before you post.

I use Inkscape (free, cross-platform, and open source) for working with vector graphics.

Doing bitmap-to-vector tracing *well* is a hard problem. I use Vector Magic to do that (and that’s all it does). It has both a web version and a desktop version.

However, if you really think about it, what we do actually promotes the capabilities of Flash every time someone uses our apps and also, anyone we train in how to use our editors will ultimately become a ripe candidate to move on to more professional tools.

Adobe certainly won’t be losing existing customers who are willing to pay for desktop applications. If anything they might be gaining more customers who have been trained online.

The target audience are all amateur designers (people who would want to try out design) but do not have access or the money to try out professional design tools.

There are 15x the number of hobbyist designers than there are professional designers.

It’s our company mission to make creation accessible to everyone and we’d rather start with the non-professional population where we see plenty of market opportunity.

Our decision to develop web apps instead of installable desktop apps is a function of our mission to be accessible: We want to remove all barriers to creation. If there is nothing to install for an end-user, they are so much more likely to begin creating.