For me, it's about much more than advertising; it's about adoption by the mass market.
Considering that the brand, Photoshop, is used by Adobe in its branding of Photoshop Creative Suite, Photoshop Creative Cloud, Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, and considering the market share of those combined products, I think it's reasonable to say in the lingo of high-technology, mass-market adoption that Photoshop is the de facto standard. Whether or not you call that the gold standard is perhaps another point or not.
Well Victor it is certainly the standard by which I judge all other photo-editing software - it may not be golden but close enough in my eyes.
Victor - the term "gold standard" means it is considered to be the benchmark that any other similar products are measured against or are compared to.
I think the moment we look at any post-processing software, most people would compare it to Photoshop to see how it stacks up against it.
Oddly enough, if you venture to any site habituated by many truly good photographers that do it for a living, you will find that they pretty well all use this software.
Can they all be wrong?
Someone once said; "you can fool all of them some of the time, and some of them all the time, but not all of them all the time".
Glenn
Does it really matter? I doubt I would describe Adobe products 'as gold standard' but I have used the term 'best of breed' in previous posts. It's also bit disingenuous to dismiss Adobe as 'all just hype and shrewd advertising.'
As far as I can see, we all make decisions based on a combination of economics, prejudice, and perceived functionality.
But, we also invest great effort developing our ability to use our preferred product(s) which in my experience makes us very unwilling to abandon the investment and use something else . I use PS6, but I will probably never take up a CC subscription ( my prejudice!). Besides which....what would be better than 'best of breed' !
This could be one of a countless number of arguments you find all over the net these days.
Any time you get a successful product you will find those that knock it:
Some because they genuinely feel its not the best for them.
Some simply because its the most popular therefor they feel they have to knock it.
Some people will argue against a product because the company is popular and makes money...how dare they.
Some are fans of another solution so will knock anything that doesn't fit their blinkered view.
Some are weird geeks that have such a limited viewpoint they feel anything that isn't exactly within their sphere is an abomination and they feel compelled to shout and scream at those that don't agree.
I have brands I like and will err towards them - we all tend to do that - but the fanboy/troll extremes are beyond me.
Adobe is the industry standard - thats - Industry Standard - because the photographic/graphics industry as a whole use it because it is the standard and best solution to the vast majority of work flows. By all means use something else if you prefer but the simple fact is Adobe is the standard that all other software solutions must be compared to.
And some seem to be able to combine just about all of these into a single post!
Smartphones are another great example of this in action; listening to some you'd wonder how they ever manage to sell a single unit. I think they live in some kind of reality distortion field.