And how will I convince the old girl that it's better than Win or Mac?

Good grief.

I didn't make any predictions regarding management back when they sold off the company after saying, time and again, that they never would, stopped selling their wares and left a bunch of customers stranded (especially the ones who started their 15-day trials during a… 30-day drought, ffs lol), shut down the forums in favor of Discord (ugh) and made a 180° on subscriptions (yeaaaah…), but I can't say I'm surprised in the least. In hindsight, what a completely stupid but understandable turn of events, considering the company that bought them.

Aaaaanyway, now that this thing looks to be with another foot in the grave, anyone willing to go the F/OSS route, as I suggested before? With these guys just coasting, and Adobe just, well, coasting, maybe those at the fringes will have another shot.

Heck, people are so fed up with even Windows and Microsoft's adware crap these days, that jumping ship to Linux may become a sensible course of action for many prosumers, if not hardened professionals, at some not-so-distant point in the future. Even I was super fed up with Apple when I feverishly edited my farewell post for the last time, but the way Alan Dye was “sacked” (rumour has it that he new he was getting the boot, hence why he let himself get poached by Meta) and Tim Cook decided to step down in such short succession after the mess that was Tahoe and their first botched attempt at a Siri revamp gives me a bit more confidence in the future of macOS, at least for the time being.

In any case, when it comes to creative software, I'll be doing my part, at least the tiny bit I can do for now before I finish and turn in my PhD thesis. I just sent the people at Scribus a bug report regarding third-party font managers (it doesn't support those, because of course it doesn't; respecting system-wide font APIs and behaving in the same way as any other macOS app is too exotic of a thing for a cross-platform, Qt-based F/OSS app to do ), and up next will come a thorough rundown of variable OpenType font support across the industry on the relevant forum topics (they still don't support those because it's a nascent format and it's technically hard to export them to PDF, and they convinced themselves that it's not that big of a deal in the market, or whatever). It's sad, because in the 1.7.x branch preview it finally got a decent, dockable palette interface and is otherwise shaping up to be a decent QuarkXPress/InDesign/Affinity Studio/Publisher competitor.

As for Inkscape and GIMP, I'm not touching those with a ten-metre-pole. Yet. It's a bit ironic, considering how Scribus was always my favourite punching bag over at Serif's forums… and it turned out to be the most native-looking of the bunch, heh.

Pity really, Serif could have become a real player in the Adobe alternative market.

I still feel that Designer is a poor relation to DrawPlus; and Publisher to PagePlus, both could have been real competitors to Indesign and Illustrator.

Oh well, what can one do?

When Canva bought Serif 5 of the 8 Serif Directors went. Including all the originator directors bar Ash

If by ‘originator directors’ you mean those who were involved when the company was founded in 1987, Ashley Hewson wasn’t one of them. He started in telesales in the late ’90s and worked his way up from there.

JAmedia wrote:

It is difficult to determine how many of the Serif senior product managers and developers are still there.

I suspect that they aren’t listed on a readily accessible single page online, but if you know their names you can look them up on LinkedIn easily enough.

That would be about the only way of doing it.  That is the thing to watch, if people start to move then the internal company culture has changed.

It is difficult to determine how many of the Serif senior product managers and developers are still there.

I suspect that they aren’t listed on a readily accessible single page online, but if you know their names you can look them up on LinkedIn easily enough.

Didn't they do this to themselves by selling out/merging?

Serif Europe and Serif Group are still registered at Companies house with the same 4 (3 actual) directors.
Todd Carpenter - Secretary and Director
Duncan Clark - Director
Claire Watkins - Director

Serif Holdings has no officers

This is not quite correct. When Canva bought Serif 5 of the 8 Serif Directors went. Including all the originator directors bar Ash

There are now  4 directors listed but one, Ash has resigned and is no longer a director. So there are only 3 actual directors.
Two of the three are Canva people who came in at the take over.  (one lives in Australia)
The third director is a fiance person who joined Serif 18 months before the take over.  Possibly, my supposition, to look for a buyer for Serif.

So there are no Serif directors left.
It is difficult to determine how many of the Serif senior product managers and developers are still there.

It is worth reading the accounts published after the first year of the Canva takeover.  It actually states that due to Canva  they had to slow up the maintenance releases for Affinity V2 more than they wanted to.

Serif was heading in to the Pro and semi-pro markets and was being seen, by professionals, as a replacement for some Adobe apps.
Canva is going in the opposite direction to the amateur market. Their latest TV adverts highlight this.

I was in a meeting for charities the other month and out of the blue some one asked about doing marketing for events. The room split. Those who were working (or trying to work) professionally went Adobe and similar (Affinity 2 was mentioned)   and those with no idea about marketing and design talking about Canva and templates

Basically Serif has gone in spirit even if legally it exists at companies house.

Serif Europe and Serif Group are still registered at Companies house with the same 4 (3 actual) directors.
Todd Carpenter - Secretary and Director
Duncan Clark - Director
Claire Watkins - Director

Serif Holdings has no officers

No real surprise at all - it is how these things work.
I do miss the "Serif" of past times. I remember getiing calls from their sales team, and I do remember getting really good deals for really good software in the post, CD and manuals.
But times change and all good things do come to an end
On the flip side, the software is still good and I still use it (PP X7 & WP X7)
Ian

I agree, this good thing has come to an end, but I still have perpetual V2 licences.
The problem is then where to go next.  Before we were on Adobe.inDesign.

I do miss the "Serif" of past times. I remember getiing calls from their sales team, and I do remember getting really good deals for really good software in the post, CD and manuals.

But times change and all good things do come to an end

On the flip side, the software is still good and I still use it (PP X7 & WP X7)

Ian

There is normally a 1-5 year clause about not doing anything else in the same field. So that the outgoing team cant set up just down the road doing something competitive or go and work for a competitor.

So the Serif Directors are all gone.
It would be interesting to see how many of the senior managers are still there.

The only pre Canva Director is the Finance Officer.  And she was only there 18 months before Canva.