It’s recently become trendy to use AI to reverse engineer products.
To reverse engineer something is basically to take it apart and see how it works. Back when I was a computer engineer, we would obtain a competitor’s physical product and try to see how they accomplished their results.
Very recently, someone got tired of paying Adobe their crazy high subscription and cancellation fees. So they reverse engineered Adobe’s product line and rebuilt it from scratch. This includes Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator.
Then they did the same with Microsoft products: Word, Excel, and Visio. Both product lines are now available for free.
There are even free tools that help you reverse engineer any software product.
People are calling this SAASpocalypse. An industry-wide disruption that effectively makes all software open-source, whether the companies want it or not.
The takeaway
Free alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft have existed for years. So clearly they offer something the alternatives don’t.