As a current software engineer at Adobe, I was really disappointed when I got the internal email announcing this this morning. It's reminiscent of Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the early 00s. Figma is the better product and Adobe knows it - but instead of using that to light a fire under them and work harder to create a better product, Adobe just used its deep pockets to make the problem go away. I was already planning on leaving the company for other reasons but this is the nail in the coffin for me.
Would agree in large part. I think the ones that were successful, they're successful enough that you forget it was an acquisition.
One off the top my head is Google Docs[1] which, for the longest time, I was pretty sure it was in-house tech. It's actually a number of acquisitions for the collaborative editor tech and then MS Office support.
It seems now that most incumbents have enough cash to not care about being that strategic about acquisitions.
The "used to" is a long long time ago. Before FAANG there was, for example Intel, Microsoft and Cisco, and they were very happy to vacuum up companies instead of holding a big r&d bag. Cisco got to be very good at it, in particular. And of course this is very much standard practice in pharma drug discovery.
I think the Golden Age of internal R&D was probably 1960-1980 at Bell Labs, IBM and the really large engineering cos like Boeing?
It seems like the model here is just a series of temporary alternatives (if we're lucky, creating value isn't easy). But people need software to be long-term viable to invest in learning and locking into the ecosystem. Seems good for the founders though.
Adobe got the money in the first place via skill. Photoshop has been the leading photo editing software for a generation. Hundreds of companies over decades, some with deep pockets, have tried to knock them off and have failed.
Figma didn't lose the money game, they sold out specifically to reap the money. The owners of Figma - where the profits tend to go in a business - are extracting at an epic scale. They sold out at a valuation far beyond anything sane. They won the money game big time.
Makes you wonder whether all of this makes any sense, since the end result isn't humanity ending up with great tools to assist human lives, but a select few with capital getting even more capital, to the detriment of the former goal.
They have not failed because they couldn’t get a great product out. They have failed because so many people are trained on Adobe products an just use those.
Yes. At an individual level, they ask the question: "Delay my deliverables a week or two in frustration as I retrain; or, pay $300". User by user, the decision is obvious: pay the ransom and move on with your life.
I did not mean it this way. The user will always ask the question: „Can i use another software for less money/more value“. Those who can will turn their back on adobe as the company is greedy and lazy. Problem is: if your company/client is a large cooperation you dont have any choice. Never underestimate professional users.
> It's that Adobe was likely seeing subscription revenue take hit from customers
While being pummeled by public markets, and being forced to make a move that might keep shareholders from calling for blood.
This is certainly not the first time that Adobe has presented a number to Figma's board — but it has to be the biggest number yet, by far.
From Figma's position: take your chances on an IPO while the Fed is cracking skulls around inflation — or flip the bit on that liability, and cash out to a desperate Adobe?
Another interesting layer to this is that Adobe only has $5b in cash according to their balance sheet, so the overwhelming majority of this deal is probably in Adobe stock with a long vesting period. Also the deal being done in a downturn means that the difference between this and an IPO is academic in my view
PowerPoint, Excel, Keyhole, YouTube, Google Maps and Android could be significantly better. There’s no competition, which means they keep their users, which means they’re not incentivised to find those ways in which those products could be significantly better.
Okay wait, Excel does have some competition now, with Google Sheets, and that can be seen in Microsoft’s recent push to distinguish Excel from Google Sheets with new features like the ‘LET’ and ‘XLOOKUP’ formula functions.
Android has no competition? I could swear there is iOS. Same with Maps - Bing, Here, Waze, Apple, Yandex even OSM provide their own maps. Do I fail to recognize a point you're making here?
Fuck yeah, let's have 50 different websites doing the exact same thing. The problem with your utopic vision of competition is the fact that people need to get paid for their work.
The result of this little competition means that Huawei is now struggling to build its own reliable push notification server because it is not allowed to use Google's one. I'm not saying they should use different code bases and I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid for their work, also not saying that there should be 50 different websites, but I think another 4-5 would be healthy for everyone.
Why are we just taking for granted that the Youtube acquisition wasn't anti-competitive? There is a reason that Youtube hasn't had any competitors in the 15 years that Google bought it. It's because video can't be done as cheaply as Youtube does it, unless you have an entirely separate industry propping it up. Selling on product at a massive loss and propping it up with a separate industry is anti-competitive.
Nobody can compete on Youtube-style video unless they first create Google. If that isn't true, where are the competitors? TikTok is the first one to even resemble a competitor, but it took 17 years and even that isn't really the same thing.
Adobe shouldn't be compared to Microsoft or Google, or hell even Salesforce, which are really good at integrating new companies into their existing suite of tools.
Adobe is comparable to Oracle or IBM, where acquisitions mean the death of product innovation as Adobe has a hard time attracting and retaining engineers to the same degree as the above companies.
If there had been no dilution. Co-founders appear to have been diluted 80% so assuming seed investors were diluted 75% it’s more like a $10-12M valuation at the seed.
So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers.
Just goes to show that if you want an outsized exit multiple the best way is to put a gun to a $100B company's head.
> So smart for both Adobe and Figma. Figma posed a serious threat to Adobe and it makes sense for them to do it. The losers are all of us poor sods who were happy Figma customers.
It's utterly fucked up that "so smart for the companies: the losers are the customers" is baked into the system we use to transact culture.
Somehow, the dynamic where a company is an organization of humans to be used to further some human cause was reversed, so now humans are elements of a corporation to be used to further the cause of the corporation. We've gone from running companies in service of humans to running humans in service of companies.
Except that all the engineers working at Figma and getting paid huge salaries, and many of whom will now get a huge exit pay day if they want it, may not have had this opportunity without the company existing. It's well and good to trash talk the idea of companies raking in huge profits, but we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the existence of these companies, and the constant cycle of start-ups and buyouts.
> we as a software industry and incredibly privileged to be making the salaries we do, and this would not be possible without the existence of these companies, and the constant cycle of start-ups and buyouts
Unless you have seen another economy with functional alternatives, this is only ever a statement of faith.
Can someone plz enlighten me how Figma competes with Adobe? AFAIK Web/app designers use either Sketch or Figma, publishers use Illustrator and photographers use Photoshop/Lightroom. At least that's how it's been back in the day. Is that no longer the case?
That whole market was Photoshop and Illustrator for a long time. That changed because of better and cheaper alternatives (like Sketch).
They have tried and failed to get it back and now seem to have given up on competing and just bought the competition instead.
It's also not just UI. Figma is a very capable vector and general purpose graphic tool. Figma made a lot of common things much easier than they are in Illustrator and Photoshop. While being online and fully collaborative. It's really an amazing tool and imo Adobe was rightfully threatened by it as I don't believe they could deliver anything close. It would just continue taking over more use cases.
While Figma is a great vector tool it doesn't hold a candle to Photoshop when it comes to image editing. There's a reason photographers use Photoshop for retouching photos.
Thanks, I've never actually seen anyone use it in practice but turns out that Figma has a 31.73% market share in the Collaborative Design And Prototyping category, while Adobe XD has a 15.14% market share in the same space
you seem to think that vector vs. bitmap is a design concern. it isn't. designers care about their form and their function. a better tool means an easier path in the design process, it doesn't matter the tool, vector or bitmap.
No, the interests of companies and customers are usually at odds with big mergers.
Competition is good for customers, it means different things get tried so there’s more diversity in products and pressure to compete on lower prices.
Figma is not selling to gain any efficiency or benefit from being included in Adobe, people are just looking for a pay day.
These kind of just payday mergers along with private equity profit by destruction mergers need a lot of regulatory backpressure because they simply aren’t in the interests of anybody but the people profiting from them.
what's truly been mind-boggling is how companies ARE made out of people... people who may well be your friends; and yet, what you said remains true, that the company wont be your friend.
If a company fires all human customer service and leaves you only with bots to interact with, it's a great saving for them, it's the worst case scenario for human customers.
I find it odd that sometimes, founders want only one thing, to be number 1. At first its a good thing, but if that doesn't work their goal is destroying their company. When you can sell your company for X billions instead of XX billions ... you succeeded in life.
Show me one real thing that you can do with XX billions, that is not possible with X billions. Excluding a star destroyer ;-)
This type of multiples is only possible when rates are low. Likely their last infusion of capital made their valuations possible but I reckon it is reduced as rates are ticking up fast.
I figured the dynamic here is market gets a checkpoint where the acquirer has admitted they're moving into maturity and so switching from build to buy.
But my first check was MSFT acquisition of GutHub.. was up on the day. Nadella had been turning the ship for a while and MS was certainly looking revived by that point.
So, not always down. There are win-win acquisitions
How can you tell what the market thinks about this decision when a company's stock price is a function of what is happening publicly at the company AND externally in the economy? How do you separate the 2 drivers?
Compare stocks with the highest correlated log returns. Anything that's economic should impact the correlated group the same, if it's company specific then that company will stand out.
Most correlated with ADBE (all have > 0.8 correlation) that I see with there price change today are:
ANSS (-0.77%)
INTU (-1.94%)
CRM (-1.73%)
MSFT (-1.77%)
ADSK (-2.61%)
As you can see none of these stocks are experiencing anywhere near the drop today that ADBE is, so you can pretty reasonably explain the drop as company specific.
I don't understand how this acquisition is not anti-competitive behavior. It was such a joy to see Figma's growth and technical innovation, and now it will just get eaten by the established power.
I don't think "the government" does anything unless someone complains. In this case, the process is to send a letter requesting a "Business Review" [1]. It's probably a "fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined" situation, but I suppose it's foolish to complain before trying. It feels like one of those processes that costs lawyer money that another business would usually pay for; however it's not clear what business would pay for this - maybe a heavy user of Figma? But then even if you 'win' and stop the sale, doesn't that alienate you from the founders?
"Some mergers change market dynamics in ways that can lead to higher prices, fewer or lower-quality goods or services, or less innovation.
Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits mergers and acquisitions when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly." "
Just filed a complaint! I didn't know this form existed, as I've never genuinely wanted to file an antitrust complaint before, but there's a first time for everything and I despise Adobe so it gets the honor of being in my first FTC complaint.
I'm happy to submit a form or complaint. I stopped doing business with Adobe years ago and this is the second product they've bought out from underneath me since then, the first being Substance.
That said, I don't know a ton about antitrust laws and imagine they need something specific. Does anybody have a clear idea what the actual breaches that I should be complaining about are?
This is not correct. There will almost certainly be a second request issued by the FTC or DOJ in this matter, and my guess is that it will almost certainly get challenged by one of those agencies. [1] In building their case, the agencies will reach out to users and competitors of the companies. Adobe and Figma know that this merger will certainly be contentious on antitrust issues, and I bet there is a large breakup fee that Adobe would have to pay for Figma if the merger was blocked for this reason.
Acquiring a competitor isn't going to automatically trigger antitrust laws. For one, web design is so far from critical infrastructure that it's just unlikely to be on their radar. And secondly, there's still a ton of competition. Even if Adobe and Figma are the two leaders, there's still loads of alternatives available. You can still use Sketch or Canva or any of the all-in-one beginner tools like Squarespace.
It's not anti-competitive because there are plenty of other options available (and anyone can go and make their own if they're willing to invest the time).
Anti-competitive would assume that there's no other viable option or means for replacement.
FWIW, I think Adobe is a shit company but calling daddy government in to thump them for (presumably) taking away or breaking the favorite toy sets a terrible precedent. If anything, this is pro-competitive because it should light a fire under the ass of indie's to replace it (which is already underway by the looks of Penpot).
Giving them more power isn't the way to do that. It hurts you long-term because you're basically saying that individuals/companies are not responsible enough to make decisions on their own (and need the government to step in).
Today they're helping you, tomorrow they're increasing your taxes to pay for their "increased efforts in policing anti-competitive behavior in private industry."
And now all of the Figma users are saying "Oh [crap]... now I need to find a new tool to use." When is the last time Adobe acquired something and it improved? They destroyed Fireworks and Dreamweaver when they acquired Macromedia (which they only did because they wanted Flash). At this point I'm tempted to swear off Adobe products entirely -- except that the combo of Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standard for photography.
I'm not enough of a power user to use a lot of the more advanced & unique features of photoshop, but a few years back I switched to Gimp & Inkscape for managing product photos & wire diagrams of things I need to laser cut. It's a bit more clunky and too a few weeks to learn the differences enough to get done what I needed to, but by now I have no need for any paid product much less one from a corporation that was a nightmare to deal with.
For anyone looking for an alternative I'd highly recommend checking out these alternatives. Especially with the devoted communities that provide a wide range of plugins it's possible to map a lot (not all) use cases onto these alternatives.
I'm not sure there are similar alternative to things like lightroom & after effects, and it may be that Adobe's ability to have a tight integration of the production pipeline through these produces can't easily be duplicated. But if your needs a little simpler, check these out.
Premiere and After Effects are also industry standards for video, Illustrator is the industry standard for illustrators, and I'm sure there's more I don't know about. As far as producing industry-standard products in the creative sphere, who is better than Adobe?
Davinci Resolve is quickly eating up Premiere/After Effects in VFX/film. Currently getting popular in small studios, but that's how it starts. Just like Blender is now a real competitor in 3D.
After Effects was one of the best pieces of software ever made around the CS6 era, it was insane how powerful it felt and how solid it was to work with while being so modular.
It's a shadow of its former self now and can't even play the timeline without the audio cutting out and pitch shifting. My Core 2 Duo laptop could do that a decade ago, my M1 Max and high end PC can't because Adobe broke playback years ago and never fixed it.
I try to avoid them like the plague. Affinity while not nearly as supported and feature rich....it doesn't stab and bleed me monthly for the privilege of bloatware...
How is Affinity Designer less feature rich? It has great features like corner rounding and interactive path offsetting that I cannot find in Figma? Also, Last time I looked Figma did not even allow skewing of objects.
Well, for a start, you can't set a stroke width less than 0.1mm, which may sound like a useless edge-case, but makes it useless as a single-point tool for designs to be sent to Lasers or CNC machines that run off a print driver.
Also, the workflow's quite clunky.
Still, I've bought it and Photo, just because I want them to one day better Illustrator and Photoshop.
- ed Sorry - 'less than 0.1pt', not 0.1mm. Samediff ultimately.
I agree. It depends on what you do with the program as to how it compares to Illustrator. From a prepress perspective where I would use it to rip apart and fix graphic files so they print properly, Affinity Designer has a long way to go. For designing it's not too bad and slowly catching up. It is also the only one I have found so far that supports Pantone....
On the audio side of things: Cool Edit Pro 2 became Adobe Audition, which was single-license but of course has since been SaaS-ed. It was never as popular as Pro Tools, Cubase, etc but it was my goto DAW (as a hobbyist) for a long time.
Apple's work in last few years on Logic Pro has it lightyears ahead of Audition, and I wouldn't even call Apple the most popular product in that space right now (oh hi, Ableton)
While it's true that Gimp can't compete with Photoshop, Lightroom has some very stiff competition in Darktable, RawTherapee and ART. In fact, depending on how you look at it, Darktable may actually be the better/more powerful raw editor.
This is probably the only tech acquisition that's ever made me sad. I just hate Adobe so much. The nightmare of their installer, the weird store with horrible designs popping up when you activate normal ui stuff, the difficulty in canceling a subscription, and the stasis in their product and ui. Oh and the sloppiness of Lightroom on mac with it's weird ui and that it didn't even import and manage photos well.
I've been so happy to have Adobe out of my life these last 10 years. I never even cared about the cost.
And figma has been so admirable, one of the best browser based apps. Always squeezing incredible performance out of the web with their crazy c++ engine. And their fast pace of delivering new features, often reworking ui just for the craft of it. It's been fun to just read the release notes.
I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe. In the 2000s, their tools were unsurpassed, and I was happy to pay the premium prices they asked (though I'd skip versions to save money). When Creative Suite was discontinued, that was a pretty abrupt turn, as I had no interest in a subscription for software I only used for personal projects.
And yet, I stayed on with Lightroom, thinking that so long as Adobe still had competition in that market, they'd keep it a one-off license. Then, one day, upon discovering some compatibility issues with the latest MacOS and the version of Lightroom I was using, I thought I'd check what the latest version of LR had to offer – and discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever.
It was painful researching and trialing alternatives, ultimately migrating my library over to Capture One, but it turned me so completely against Adobe that I've actively requested employers not assign me a Creative Cloud license (the tools fortunately only being tangential to my role).
I find myself coming back to this Steve Jobs quote more and more:
"It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers."
Creatives build companies, and if you are not careful, sales will destroy them.
MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this.
I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.
Office on the web actually does this really well now. The desktop app is a little more glitchy, but Google doesn't even have one of those. I really like tracked changes in Word on the web. Microsoft has come a real long way in the last three years.
Does this include products like Word Online? Because that product is awful.
The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.
I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.
Completely different experience for me. The desktop app is solid (although latest patches made it unstable + the visual change is just not good), but the collaboration tools are horrible to use.
You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).
> Office on the web actually does this really well now.
Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.
I won't touch any web app because I'm perfectly fine using my Vimium shortcuts that I don't need them to interfere with a web app that could have been just a native app...
You must have been using an old version of MS Office, or had it improperly configured. We use Office for real time collaboration on documents all the time. You can put a file on SharePoint, then have multiple users edit live using a mix of desktop, mobile, and web applications. The changes are immediately visible and this doesn't create different copies.
Microsoft Office, Teams, and SharePoint have comprehensive APIs so you can export any metadata you want. It's no different from competing Google products in that regard.
MS Office is actually a counter example of this. It was much worse than Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and WordPerfect. They crushed the competition because of vampiric sales strategies.
Early versions of the individual Microsoft Office products might have lacked some features compared to competitors. Their real innovation was building an integrated suite with consistent user experience. That was tremendously valuable to casual users.
Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.
Word for Windows was NOT worse than WordPerfect. WordPerfect continued using their primitive inline codes after GUIs were the norm.
Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.
They crushed the competition, because competition management was quite bad with their decisions, a good example of their bad decisions was sticking to MS-DOS until it was too late.
Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.
It is also interesting to see what designers actually think about the future of Figma. I think, the market is always in move. https://youtu.be/hDHByVS2I6Q
There is a lesson to be had there for sure. It all started when they bought Macromedia. Happens to many if the greats, look at Cisco,IBM, AT&T they all have that happen to them after which the only way decision makers know how to make great products is to buy other companies.
There is a difference between taking out the competition on acquiring IP by taking over vs doing it to innovate. Google has gone down this road already from what I've seen but Microsoft impresses me how they are keeping balance.
From 2015-2019 I found this quote massively ironic as it seemed Apple had fallen prey to the same thing. They were trying to sell Gimpbooks with 2 ports and unreliable keyboards for a €1700 base price, and iPhones that were milquetoast iterations of past one's kept creeping up €75-150 per year. Their sales growth was cratering.
People love to say that reducing Ive's involvement is what righted the ship, but I feel internally there must have been way more management house cleaning that they so massively reversed course with the Macbook line, and the price reduction + increased innovation on the iPhone line.
> ...Genzo Hattori, the son of founder Kintaro, recognized that the existing company structure of both factories was limiting their ability to innovate. In 1953 he decided to install different management groups for the Kameido and Nagano factories and have them perform their research and development independently....
It's a great quote for what has happened to the USA in almost every single area, industry, government, education, religious thought, political thought.
I recently found out MARS yes the candy company has become the largest owner of Veterinarian offices in the USA. It really is palpable how everything is on a runaway train and we can all see it yet are powerless to stop it.
Also cat food. They invest in a reef conservation technique too, and named a reef in Indo - where they were trialing said technique - after one of their catfood brands. The logo says "more coral today, more fish tomorrow" and there's a picture of a cat.
Started in Europe with pet food (90's). Slowly moved into pet pharma and scientific research. Then in 2007 they started moving into the vet game. Seems like a pretty natural evolution. Wonder if they'll try to buy Chewy.
It happens here in a unique way, partly because of the legal structure we have around public corporations. In the US, institutional investors want to see revenue growth, even over profits. Way more sexy. And they have ways to arm-twist management by influencing the board, agitating for new board members, etc. They work to frighten other stockholders into supporting them and then management has to go along. Sarbanes-Oxley might be waved around, too.
Normally, a cash-cow business would be a great thing to own. Unfortunately the accumulated cash plus (feared or actual) slowing of growth equal a big red flag.
Ironically when Apple acquired NeXT, it was essentially a reverse take over, since almost every significant executive and technical position of the merged company was from NeXT.
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
I think BeOS was a serious contender as the next generation MacOS. But BeOS didn't have Steve Jobs. Buying NeXT meant bringing Jobs back at the helm of Apple.
It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.
It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo of a relatively incremental improvement to the classic MacOS formula. It was only a “serious contender” in the media and in the headcanon of Apple’s fan base.
BeOS was also multi-platform (PPC and later IA-32), like NeXTStep. Anyway, yes, it was rough around the edges, but it was way more accessible; the hardware was a lot less expensive, and when sold as a standalone OS, was also reasonably priced for a hobbyist. There were a lot of great ideas in there, especially compared to the Windows, MacOS, and the various other *nixes of the time.
I'm not saying Apple made the wrong choice to be reverse-acquired by NeXT, obviously, they've done pretty well. But an alternate universe where Apple acquired BeOS is well within the imagination.
In an alternate universe where Apple acquired Be, we'd see another Copland-esque slow moving catastrophe as the skeletal and unproven Be technology was cobbled together with everything needed to execute a plausible transition plan for the existing System 7 platform. This had every prospect of turning the Macintosh into another Amiga: even if a BeOS technology transition was a miraculous success, Apple's prospects as a company would be largely unchanged, because the real problems at Apple wasn't technology, it was a lack of leadership.
Would a Be acquisition do anything about the hundreds of engineers fritting away at dead ends like Pippin, OpenDoc and NewtonOS? Would it have stopped Apple from selling awful flawed hardware like the Power Macintosh 5000 and 6000 series? Unlikely. It's easy to forget just how ridiculous the Apple Computer of 1996 was. It was a company destined to — and deserved to — be consigned to the history books.
As valuable as the NeXT technology was to Apple, its importance is utterly dwarfed by the actions of Steve Jobs to rip away at the junk and rebuild the company in every sense of the word.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo
So true. Even though the market share of NeXTStep never got very high, it was a robust, battle-tested operating system that ran on multiple processor architectures with real software like FreeHand and Lotus Improv, an amazing spreadsheet for the time that would hold up pretty well today.
And interestingly enough, one of the main BeOS guys ended up at Apple and worked on APFS.
I tried both back in the day, and tech demo is exactly right (a really cool tech demo, to be sure! but still). The OS came with a simple task manager-type app that had two buttons on it that could be used to disable either processor (to demonstrate how it affected system performance, I guess?). Thought I, "Hmm, surely they wouldn't let you turn off both.." But nope; everything immediately halted.
By comparison, NeXTStep was quite polished, certainly by the time it was available for x86, which is when I used it.
Agree; while they had some very nice ideas (like taking their filesystem capabilities and tracker and make it into basic email), they did some things that would be fatal: like locking their ABI into gcc 2.95 C++ ABI. Which was immediately a problem, when gcc 3.0 came out. Ugh.
My friend had an Newton and I was in awe. It made Palm look like a pocket calculator.
Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.
But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.
NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.
Yes indeed it was. I ran OS X in beta on a G4 for a year as my main OS. It was that innovative and great. Like magically having the “Linux on the desktop” dream come true overnight.
It was clunky and slow at the time but it was so awesome it hardly mattered.
Reminds me of the Simpsons when the Newton is used to make a note to beat up Martin and the hand writing recognition is slightly off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M
When 2007 rolled around, broadband internet was widely available; search, mapping, social media had caught on. People were ready to take the internet with them in their pocket.
To echo the sibling comments, this is incorrect. NeXT lives on today in every Mac, iPhone, iPad, and every other Apple device. When Apple bought NeXT they used it as a foundation for OS X, which went on to power every device Apple makes or has made.
The kind of creatives we're talking about, kind of by definition, do things differently (not to ape Apple's old slogan too much). That's AKA risk, and, yes, sometimes it will lead to ruin.
But it's also the only way to move the area forward.
It's interesting to consider how Apple and NeXT were both nearing collapse in the late 1990s, and yet combining the two resulted, over the next 20 years, in perhaps the most successful tech company of all time.
Apple needed Steve Jobs back then. It needs another Steve Jobs now as well. Under Tim Cook, Apple has been great in terms of stock-market price and profitability, but the company clearly lacks a unifying vision for the future. They've bought themself time, but sooner rather than later, we'll see Apple decline and it won't look good.
The Xerox PARC vision (tabs, pads, boards, gui, mouse, OOP) have largely played out. Smart TVs have not fulfilled the the potential for boards. As an industry, we collectively turned away from the potential of user-modifiable software (Smalltalk, Hypercard).
AI/ML, VR, AR, as far as I know, wasn’t coming out of PARC. I am not sure they have the same kind of mass market appeal … or maybe, we do not have someone like a Steve Jobs that could bring it to the masses.
Just because you don't see any Apple skunkworks VR/AR headsets getting left in a motel room [1] and they don't report how much they are investing in that new product line (rumored to be more in total than Meta's 10B/y) - you should not underestimate the potential for immersive spatial computing to do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the iPod.
this is true, to be fair .. anyone remember "Xaos Tools" (video effects), Audion or when Marc Cantor became so personally offensive that the business people paid him to leave? it is true.. end of innocence stories here
This is mere hand-wringing; Steve Jobs never cared to consider the aspects of our political system that leads to this, on the contrary, he positively exploited them for his own gain, e.g. patents and his app store tyranny. Steve Jobs is among the worst people to talk about this kind of neo-feudalism.
I used to beta test for them. A few months back I took at look at the current version of Audition to see what I'd been missing out on since the days of CS6 nearly a decade ago.
Three things have changed. It now includes one third-party plugin (that anyone could purchase) offering an alternative volume meter - the equivalent of a slightly different color histogram for photo/video software. It offers some new presets with friendlier names, for a feature that already existed. And they unified version numbers with other products. EDIT: Also some bug fixes, but poorly documented and tbh pretty rare edge cases. I still use CS6 in production and bugs are not a source of worry.
That's it. Anyone who has been paying a subscription for this has been getting ripped off wholesale. The product is great - but it was great before Adobe acquired it (when it used to be called CoolEdit) and Adobe actually removed functionality from it along the way, like dumping MIDI support because they didn't want to cater to musicians.
Any designers/engineers that understand or use the product left long ago. A standout example of this in their playlists feature - you can select a bunch of marked regions in a waveform or project and add them to a separate list, where you can rearrange their playback order freely - very useful if you are structuring a radio program or a podcast. Except...once you've found an arrangement you like, you can't do anything else with it. You can't render the audio to a new file, generate a new project, export it, save the list to a text file, or copy it to the clipboard, or anything else. They started building it 10 years ago and then never bothered to finish it.
I don't really think of Adobe as a software company any more. They're IP landlords who spend the bare minimum on integration and maintenance of their properties while continuously jacking up the rent.
CoolEdit! haven't heard that name in a while. Yeah, Adobe used to be ultra-respected, especially in the 90's as Photoshop took the world by storm. These days, as you can see, the response to "X acquired by Adobe" is met with universal disappointment (except by those who have Adobe stock, I guess).
Acid 2.0 was for loops and basically a DAW vs the SoundForge sound design angle. I made some wicked tracks in Acid back in the day. Also became a Sony product, still works pretty much the same.
Why the past tense? Which tools have been surpassed? Have Photoshop been surpassed? I am genuinely curious here.
I take note of Capture One, but is it an "acceptable yet technically inferior alternative that I picked because I don't agree with Adobe business practices" (which I think is a valid reason) or a viable alternative even for someone who doesn't have a problem dealing with Adobe and their subscription model.
Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher have been a breath of fresh air for the last few years. They have you pay once, not a subscription. The features keep coming at a great pace while retaining a very sensible UI.
Reminds me of the early days when pro Mac software was well designed and reasonably priced; not the bloatware we get from Adobe
and Microsoft today, for example.
I’ve been a Capture One user for several years and it’s a more powerful tool than Lightroom for sure. Layer capability removes the need to go to PS for most simple use cases. Their color tools were much better previously as well but LR has some major recent updates. I also like their session catalog model, but that’s optional and mostly personal preference. It’s not as well designed IMO, a bit more of a power user tool where you can tweak the UI to your liking, but in terms of functionality it’s as good or better than LR.
Affinity Photo is also on the same level as PS, I don’t know about “surpassed” but Adobe is no longer the clear leader.
I gave up GIMP for Krita years ago and have yet to see a reason to change (I still use Adobe as well, but for FOSS tools, Krita has stayed at the top for me)
Actually I'm using Darktable with great success for post processing my raw files on Linux and Mac. On the paid side Affinity & CaptureOne provide great alternatives.
I’ve tried it for years and years, paid customer. Had issues with Sony files and now have issues with Nikon Z raw files. C1 generates artifacts in transitions, terrible ones. Filed a bug report and got met with the worst customer support in my life, “devs don’t wanna fix this, use ICC profiles”, as if ICC profiles would fix bad processing of the files…
Which is sad because the software in general is a lot better than Lightroom, but your first point just isn’t true and that should be the primary thing to get right in a raw processor. Also, don’t conflate over sharpening and extra saturation for better quality (C1 defaults)
Is there some sort of cloud storage integration? One thing I like about Lightroom CC is how seemlessly I can move between devices and not have to worry about having large HDDs and backups.
I'm not a designer full time, but have dabbled over my career and in my youth used Photoshop and Premiere heavily. I'd say Pixelmator and Sketch were more approachable, discoverable and had better workflows. This made the combo of being easier to pick up than Adobe tools and more powerful for professionals.
I was able to use Figma productively in my first day of using it. The added collaboration features with Figma's App preview mode and collaboration in the tool made me never look at anything else when I needed to design something.
Capture One and Lightroom are definitely fighting in the same class. Both are true pro-grade tools. Some people and some workflows will prefer one of the two, but that's how preferences work.
So, in double-blind tests, most people prefer the 'Pepsi' analogue, but when they know or think they know which one is the 'Coke' analogue, the choose that one?
. o O ( I don't really know which is the Pepsi and which is the Coke, in this matchup. )
> discovered it had gone subscription-only as well, meaning my entire photo library would now be trapped on my old laptop unless I paid a monthly fee forever.
I empathize, but isn't all this the reason they would fork out so much for figma?
I mean, people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription. It's confusing psychology at play here...
> people hated them for going subscription with the tools that used to be desktop, but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription
I think a big part of it is exactly that, that Figma's value proposition as a subscription was always clear from the beginning, that it's not just a design tool but a real-time, collaborative design environment. Sketch was always the better choice for solo, side-project work, because it was a one-off purchase with no need for a cloud component (its more recent direction to try to become a cloud-first service has unfortunately only served to highlight its shortcomings versus Figma).
Creative Suite never had a value proposition as a subscription apart from becoming a predictable cost center for businesses. Tacking on an inferior version of Dropbox, making the whole suite subscription-only, and calling it Creative Cloud did a pretty decent job of alienating those who didn't fall into that "predictable cost center" market.
A lot of amateur photographers used Lightroom and were willing to pay a one off purchase price whereas a monthly cost for something you might hardly use in a month is too expensive. Figma has a high percentage of users who use it regularly as part of their paying jobs. It also has online features, which you expect to pay continuously for. Lightroom Classic had no online features.
I still use Lightroom 6, the last standalone version, so I haven’t found anything else with such good combination of library organisation & editing. But no way I’ll ever pay a monthly subscription for the current, slightly better version or the less capable cloud version.
And the cloud version of LR does offer cool features if you use them. I just need my iPad now when traveling. Can proof and start edits right there, then continue on the computer. I pull my images onto the iPad and let the cloud sync and back them up.
The only system that might be able to replace the workflow I currently use is Apple Photos, but it doesn't deal that well with RAWs and editing outside of the Photos.app.
> I can't think of any other company to which my relationship as a customer has swung so completely as Adobe.
Autodesk is very similar in many ways to Adobe, just in a slightly different software market. Wouldn't at all surprise me if they merge up at some future point into some evil monstrosity of user-hostility + borderline useful software.
I hope they go at each other like two big evil flaming titans in a massive battle that mortally wounds both of them.
I sometimes sit and weigh out which one of them does more evil to stop innovation in the “digital creativity” space in the name of monopolistic greed.
So far I think Adobe is winning because their products are more average consumer facing. But Autodesk sure seems to be racing to the bottom with its complete monopoly on 3D everything.
I can't believe I'm not the only one. Something similar happened to me with one of their iPad painting apps. They told me it would be completely free for artists. Went to save my files and put them on my computer for printing, only to learn they were locked within the adobe cloud cage of despair
The Lightroom subscription is particularly painful because not only did Lightroom move to a subscription, they also “updated” it to a version with fewer features.
I really want to move off Lightroom, to something that doesn’t change a subscription, but getting close to a terabyte of data out of that cloud with all the edits and into something else is painful.
For a large company, they also have pretty shady pricing. Like their “annual plan, paid monthly”. You’d think you’re just paying for the monthly subscription, but they hide the fact that you have to pay a penalty for early cancellation in the fine print.
There are dark patterns in Adobe's pricing plans up the wazoo. And each year it seems that they change their UI just a little more to try to lock your data into their Creative Cloud. Photoshop now tries to save your files to the Creative Cloud (instead of your computer) by default.
I think the concern has definitely gone to an anti-trust level. Adobe packages Lightroom for free with Photoshop, probably with Capture One directly in their sights. Anti-trust definitely needs a reinvigoration.
Sounds like Adobe has taken a page out of Microsoft’s book. That is, defaulting saving to their paid cloud storage solution instead of the user’s local system.
It’s a scummy tactic but it must pay if companies keep doing it. I suspect it preys mostly on the vulnerable less-tech-savvy users.
That pissed me off so much when it got me. I can count the number of dark patterns I've ever fallen for (well, and eventually found out about) on one finger.
It's so stupid too, I'm happy paying subscriptions for things and happy paying a fair price but being tricked into doing it - never again, Adobe. They target their own customers with it to scrape a few more dollars into the current quarter, I guess. Probably some executive bonus targets or something.
Literally the only time I've ever fallen for a dark pattern.
Shame that I've managed to avoid the most aggressive dark patterns used by scammers and shady practioners. The one that got me was from a $150B company.
And depending on your use case, bloated. In all the features Photoshop has gained since 6.0, 7.0, and CS1, only a tiny handful add anything of value for my usage. If 7.0 or CS1 were ported to modern operating systems they would fill my needs well and then some.
This is another reason why alternatives such as Affinity Photo and Pixelmator are increasingly enticing; their core feature sets have reached near-parity with that of Photoshop for many and so Photoshop offers very little extra value.
My wife tried to cancel her subscription but the agent on the live chat just quickly and out of the blue gave her 4 months of free subscription. Not sure if this is unusual or part of their playbook.
Part of their retention playbook. I needed Illustrator for a short term project. Only needed it for less than a month so paid for a 30 day term. Almost forgot about it but went to cancel it on the last day. They gave me a month for free automatically. No customer service rep was involved.
- It was rather annoying I had to check & double-check that I was only paying for 30 days and not getting ensnared in the annual plan with monthly payments & a big cancellation fee. Next time I need a vector editor, I'll just buy one from the app store.
Yes, their "3 months for 3" and then: oh, now you're locked into a paying 12 month contract was absolutely the last straw for me. Swore off their products.
Always wondered why an indie app developer hasn't just decided to work their image-editor app up as "the new Fireworks."
Many other image-editor apps do now take Fireworks' same non-destructive hybrid editing approach... kind of. But they're always missing one thing or another. Either:
1. they aren't multiplatform (can't get "standard" adoption like Fireworks if you're macOS-only)
2. they don't go far enough with the vector editing capabilities (e.g. Fireworks allows you to apply arbitrary gradients/textures/other image assets as the stroke and fill of vector shapes)
3. they don't go far enough with the non-destructiveness (e.g. Fireworks applies filter-effects to both vector and raster layers, as non-destructive "filter layers" bound to a parent layer — effectively "functional lenses" for images; can edit the base layer "underneath" these transformation layers, and see the transformed output change as a result. Of course, you can always "flatten" the transformations into the layer, to then edit the post-transformed version of the layer. Though IMHO this could be taken even further, with "brush modifications" being just another kind of transformation layer!)
4. they use project file formats that consist of entire directory bundles, or file formats opaque to the OS preview mechanism. Fireworks just stored projects as an extension chunk of a PNG file; and every OS knows how to preview PNG files. (And, if you didn't care about the project, you could just treat the PNG file as a PNG file, putting it through ImageMagick or MSPaint or whatever, which would strip the optional chunks, thus "exporting" the project to PNG without needing the program that created it!)
Affinity Designer is a good vector/bitmap combo app. It closely parallels Illustrator features but adds in basic bitmap editing. If you pair it with Affinity Photo you get most of the Photoshop features. The same files can be shared with both without any loss of fidelity.
I’ve had the same question for years! There are a few tools that have tried over the years, but nothing that has stuck around.
And I get that the pixel-perfect design and slicing from the Fireworks era isn’t as useful in today’s world of responsive design and multiple screen sizes and variable screen densities, where CSS and JavaScript plays a much larger role, but I still wish we had a successor.
Because as you said, although most apps now do the hybrid vector/faster thing, nothing really matches what we had with Fireworks.
The only program I ever used that felt like it was really gunning for Fireworks was, weirdly, a BeOS-exclusive app called e-Picture. It was a little buggy, but still terrific. (That last sentence sums up the entire BeOS ecosystem circa 1999, granted, which was tiny yet still bigger than I suspect most people know.)
PNG format has a space for arbitrary metadata. Fireworks stored their proprietary save format inside this, and also rendered the file to flat PNG on save, meaning that you could preview fireworks files in anything that could read PNGs (although the file size would be huge).
Unfortunately not...For one, combining bitmap and vector editing is just not there...Also, while I like Sketch and have used it extensively, I haven't missed anything of it with Figma.
Agree. Macromedia products were amazing for their time. Dreamweaver, Flash (Creating flash apps including ActionScript), Fireworks with vector + bitmap, were all very cool until Adobe acquired them
The largest Pictionary-like web app for the good part of a decade or so (early 2000s to early 2010s) was a Shockwave/Director app. Newer clones are yet to match its amazing features. Unfortunately isketch.net got too old for the newer generations to pick it up. I can only guess what happened to the site. The technical debt must have been too great to port it to a newer platform, or perhaps the devs/maintainers moved on.
This was already basically Sketch years and years before Sketch even existed. They killed it because Adobe as a company has a complete lack of vision and even understanding of the tools they own.
This is 100% right. Fireworks was Sketch with better bitmap/filter/styling support. Removing it was a cost saving move right as Sketch/Figma were coming to own UI design.
I still use my copy of Fireworks for everything graphics related that I need. Yes, it doesn't do everything as well compared to modern suites but the UI was just so easy for a developer to use. Even Homesite is still better than most editors I've ever used.
To me, Sketch is a spiritual successor of Fireworks.
I loved Fireworks, but it had far too many quirks that weren't improved, and when I discovered Sketch I was amazed how many thing that did bother me a lot in Fireworks were made just right in Sketch.
I considered putting Adobe in a VM because i didn't want the 30,000 extra processes running when I install it. Its embarrassingly fragmented and bad. I absolutely dread the moment when I need to install CS on my new machine.
I went a step further, or maybe backward, and I have a separate computer that I connect to with AnyDesk and it has all the Adobe crap installed on it.
Also, our company credit card got replaced, and the process of updating the card and re-activating Creative Cloud took two weeks. It got canceled August 29 and only yesterday, September 14, was I able to launch Illustrator without a nag window. I hate Adobe.
How the hell did Photoshop get so bloated? The featureset hasn't changed all that much since CS3 era, and yet CS3 ran at half the memory and at twice the speed. What the hell happened?
Adobe Photoshop has always been bloated. It’s the professional standard so artists will literally buy a fast computer just to run it. There’s worse examples of professional software like Autodesk where a workstation class PC is only a fraction of the software licensing cost. And is more crash prone.
I've been running ACad daily on a 3rd gen i5 with no dGPU. FWIW I don't use the 3D things as I use it for architectural works but I don't see any issues, runs fine.
Maybe 15 years ago I ended up fencing the CC stuff off with firewall rules because it was the fastest way to deal with its awfulness.
With the next computer for half a year it was always this queasy, i should probably install illustrator now, but once I do I can never go back. Maybe I can hold out another few weeks. This is for a corporate paid for version that would make my work easier. Eventually I buckled and it ruined another computer.
I’m not terribly upset because I think it could be worse if others bought them, but I think they’ve stagnated and had lots of stability problems since the purchase.
I don't agree on the 'stagnated' part. A lot has come out of Github since that acquisition. I am actually impressed how it has managed to mature into a fully enterprise grade ecosystem yet somehow maintaining its allure and user friendliness that smaller developer teams enjoy.
I don’t think it’s enterprise at all. I can’t create groups to sync with AD. I can’t link organizations. I can’t link accounts to AD to pull even info like name.
They’ve added a lot of “social media” functions like feeds and stuff.
I like what they’ve done with Actions though, that’s neat.
I'm a very heavy slack user for work and personal workspaces and haven't seen anything bad yet, though I also don't pay the bill for those organizations. Im sure over time it may get worse, but for the meantime this seems to be one of those rare acquisitions where the child company is doing so well the parent may be afraid to touch it (rightfully so).
> Microsoft buying Github
This one haunts my dreams. Microsoft is drawing a huuuuge moat around the developer experience. I have to imagine they will tighten the noose within the next 5 years. Ditto for Gaming as they now own half the games industry: EA, Activision/Blizzard, Obsidian, and many many more.
Tried to run away from Adobe and they still got me, RIP... Will have to move again once they ruin Figma with feature overload.
Simplicity is so hard to achieve with design and Figma has done a great job striking the balance with feature set and simplicity. All the while delivering a super responsive platform.
Still running Creative Suite 6 in a virtual machine (for security isolation and compatibility) as I only use the product 2-3 times a year and refuse to give in to Adobe's rent-seeking.
Adobe's stock is down 17% on the news. So, it's bad for consumers. Bad for Adobe. Probably only good for the ego of a few executives and investment bankers.
They may have considered that by bundling Figma's functionality into their cloud subscription, with the number of new subscribers that would bring, that revenue attributable to that added functionality would be much more than 400 million annually.
It would need to be much, much more than 400 million to justify the purchase, and I'm not sure numbers of that size will ever materialize.
Another way to look at it is, what amount of investment would Adobe need to make to bring equivalent functionality in-house. Certainly less than 20 billion, by an order of magnitude at least. But then you have to wait, and manage with inspiration and dedication, and possibly fail. Not for the faint of heart.
My guess is there are a lot of Figma employees who would rather not be working for Adobe, regardless of whatever incentives they get in the deal. It's hard to overstate how little regard software designers have for Adobe.
It gives me whiplash to see Sean Parent's deeply technical public talks on Adobe's experiences with C++, and Adobe's disdain for customers (and presumably other programmers' disdain for Adobe).
Well they wont all be massive now that mostly VCs and sometimes founders soak up all the benefits from an acquisition before the regular employees get much.
Well, good for the founders and investors anyways, who knows how many employees had meaningful holdings that outweigh the hurt of being integrated into Adobe
Well if it's any consolation the market also feels sad about this [0]. ADBE is down 15% as of this writing.
My guess is because, given the current market, you don't really need to spent money acquiring potential competitors. As rate hikes continue (and likely will for the foreseeable future) I suspect many of the non-ipo's non-profitable startups will just die on the vine. No reason to spend $20 Billion to make sure they're not a threat, this isn't 2018.
Only open and free software can defeat the likes of Adobe.
Can't wait for the dominance of Photoshop to be ended by gimp and ffmpeg, I've found that they work fairly well for whatever editing I need. Maybe open source variety of Figma also exist?
The one thing I know about is Penpot see https://penpot.app/ which is by the team that designed Taiga.io - It's fully open-source and I think tries to solve some of the same problems but it's still in beta. I'm not much of a designer but yesterday started to teach myself Figma only to find this acquisition happening. I've resisted installing creative cloud for years and hearing various people's experiences with Adobe makes me feel like this was a wise decision.
Our university subscribes to Adobe Products Suit- when all of their functionality can be replicated with FOSS. They sent out a survey about this before they started the subscription and I answered negatively to that, to no avail. So that's where our tuition/grant/loan/savings money are going.
It’s not illegal to be a monopoly; it’s illegal to use your monopoly to profoundly disadvantage your competitors.
An example was Microsoft threatening to cancel HP’s Windows license if they bundled Netscape Navigator instead of Internet Explorer back in the browser war days.
This comment makes me sad because Adobe used to be an exceptional example of how good professional software could be, and now I can’t disagree with you at all. I don’t mean to disparage anyone at Adobe, but I think as a business it’s become a place good things get acquired to die.
Every single one of these corporate consolidations makes me sad. Competition and heterogeneity are critical for capitalism to function and everyone one of these mergers reduces it.
Figma was not generating profit and they also started doing some shady practices according to this guy. I was not Figma user so I don't know if that is true but this seems like an interesting video opinion on it https://youtu.be/xpCqZwMekCI
Never had an issue with this tbh, it's always very easy. Manage account > cancel plan.
Hell, if you subscribe but then cancel within the same day, they give you a full refund. I've abused this a few times if I just need to do something quick - sub, use it for a few hours, cancel, and it doesn't cost me anything.
I did a trial of Creative Suite on my mac. When it was time to uninstall, I couldn't do that using Creative Cloud Uninstaller. Because, apparently I have to uninstall photoshop and other softwares from Creative Cloud App before uninstalling CC. I couldn't uninstall photoshop etc. because my login to CC App didn't work. So, I contacted Adobe, there was some issue with getting 2FA to my email for some reason. I had to reset my mac just to get rid of Adobe spywares.
Adobe pioneered the "click cancel plan but we will offer you some stuff that you don't care about in order to stop you from cancelling your plan" dark pattern.
Then on the support call they will straight up pretend that none of their systems work in order to stop you from cancelling.
I have literally cancelled (and later re-obtained) subscriptions to CC at least 15 times. It hasn't been an issue, and I've never needed to call anyone.
They do offer you things, but those things tend to be free months. Not random stuff you won't care about.
If I'm trying to cancel I don't care about free months or free storage space or discount on their new product. those are random things I don't care about.
To cancel a yearly plan, you must a) talk to their support staff (not available as an option in the portal) and b) pay the remainder of the period anyway.
The only time you can freely modify your subscription is one month before your renewal date.
Adobe could eliminate this loophole by simply charging the difference (between what they actually paid and what they would have paid on a monthly play) when they opt out.
Presumably the current arrangement is some kind of creative accounting exercise though, and such a pro-customer policy might blow it up.
That doesn't sound right to me either though. You enter a contract for 12 months at a reduced price. The company knows it will get 12reduced price. Now the customer wants to drop out after 7 months and you pay 7delta.
What you just have done is eliminate the monthly price. There can never be an annual contract anymore. That seems beyond silly. Is it really Adobe's fault for you trying to either be sneaky or simply malicious?
I do this because I specifically assumed using Adobe there would be some maniacal dark pattern they wouldn’t really let me cancel sooner than a year despite what the main text stated. Seems like I was correct, reading this thread.
I'm paying via Paypal so I've just cancelled the adobe subscription through their subscription management panel. Is there any reason why this might be a bad idea?
PS I just remembered that I forgot to cancel the subscription and they want to charge me 40 quid for the rest of the year. I even had a reminder set, but I missed it. So annoying.
> Given the amount of information regarding adobe being a bunch of cntz over the last many years, you got anyone you actually want to blame?
I was asking for advice, so I’m a bit confused about your comment.
I’ve been using them since photoshop 5 and generally had a positive opinion for most of that time. I learned about the whole annual sub/weekly payments issue last year.
Come to think of it, I do blame them for dark UX and making the process unnecessarily difficult (which has worked in my case perfectly).
I have an adobe subscription, I never heard of Figma. I am sure their product is great, but it is a niche product. Figma is not worth 20B as a standalone company. Adobe will integrate Figma’s technology into Adobe’s suite of products and will make it available to the masses. I say it is a good thing that Adobe is acquiring Figma.
Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption.
You’re definitely not aware of how Figma changed the game and how essential it is to web design today. Whether you’re a solo designer, a freelancer, a startup, a tech company, a UX team in a major company… Figma just works. And just makes sense. Their velocity is fantastic. They launch features every few months. The performance is incredible. The ease of use is phenomenal. The collaboration capabilities are perfectly integrated. Even developers use it and love it.
They have taken the market by storm. And it’s a huge market.
You don’t seem to be part of that target market, and that’s fine. But saying Figma joining Adobe is a plus just shows how little you know about Figma and the web design world in general.
The thing about Adobe is that their products are used by common people and professionals. I edit 10 of my personal photos a year, still I have an Adobe subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom.
Had Figma been part of the Adobe Suite I would have at-least downloaded it and tried it. As great as Figma is, reach of their product is limited, Adobe is giving Figma‘s technology the reach they would have never gotten as a standalone company.
I said Figma is not worth 20 billion as a standalone company. It might be worth 20 billion to Adobe. Adobe can do to Figma what Facebook did to Instagram, Facebook took a relatively small startup Instagram and made it into a global juggernaut worth hundreds of billions in value.
Similar story with ByteDance and Musically, how many of you have used Musically before Bytedance bought it and re-branded it as TikTok.
Heads up, then, it's the de-facto standard in UX / UI design these days. There are alternatives, but this is the go-to tool people are training on, using at work, etc. It's not some unknown tool that's being saved by Adobe out of obscurity.
> Change is hard; As a Figma consumer you are probably uncomfortable with the change, but Adobe acquiring is better than Figma going shutting down due to lack of mass adoption
Hilariously bad take. Figma has very strong adoption. Lacking the same scale as Adobe doesn't mean it has bad adoption.
Hilariously ignorant. I've seen steady adoption into businesses like large banks for UX and design work over the last two years, in domains previously dominated by Adobe. This acquisition looks like a defensive one. They are not saving Figma from death in obscurity, hence the price tag.
Although it’s still great software I’m stopping usage today because a) I refuse to support adobe and b) I’m confident the software will progressively get much worse, so any investment today is a waste of time I should spend finding and learning something else.
I love Sketch but macOS is no longer the OS I spend the most times in, which is Linux and Windows. I'd love for Sketch to be cross-platform, I'd buy one license per year just to support them.
So my only option was Figma and now... Now what? Damn this sucks.
Check out Framer. It's actually a really nice UI/UX and prototyping tool, but is pretty opinionated in how you set up your file (IMO). I used it a lot when I was freelancing because it gave me a little more power than Sketch did, at the time, and was more mature than Figma. They are the one product I know of currently that has web, Windows and Mac clients.
This ^ is what's lead my small sample size of companies to move from Sketch to Figma. The focus on cross platform and ease of use that Figma had really helped drive adoption across a wide range of company sizes which is probably why this is such a logical acquisition for Adobe.
Common things are so obtusely buried in these applications. It's extraordinary the decisions they make.
Maybe there should be a telematics tool for gtk that tracks when a user is clicking around looking for something and treats it like a bug report after a program crash.
Some Non-Obtrusive (very important) dialog says something like "looking for something? Tell us what and where you're expecting it so we can add it".
There's no reason at all things can't be in 2 or 3 places instead of like View / Interface Options / General / Advanced / ... or wherever the hell someone decided to place it.
Many years ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia, they acquired a tool called Fireworks[1]. This was a combined bitmap and vector editor that was incredibly well-optimised for user-interface and web design, at a time when most designers were paying exorbitant license fees to do such work painfully and slowly in Photoshop and Illustrator. Fireworks was cheap, powerful, and hugely ahead of its time. Many of the features and flows people love in Figma and Sketch were pioneered years earlier in Fireworks.
After the acquisition, Adobe starved Fireworks of resources and marketing. They broke things, left major bugs and performance regressions unfixed, and eventually discontinued it altogether. I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.
As much as I hope otherwise, I believe the acquisition of Figma will go the same way. Once it's under the Adobe umbrella, the simple mathematics of profits from Photoshop and Illustrator vs. those from Figma will result in the latter being starved, stripped of functionality, and eventually left broken.
I used Fireworks for years for web design stuff - it was simple to use, but fully featured, a real joy to use.
As soon as Adbobe bought Macromedia, I knew they would shitcan it because of Photoshop and Illustrator. And I knew other nice Macromedia tools, like Dreamweaver, would have a similar fate. Such a shame, and buying a competitor just to kill it feels so wrong :(
I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate, but I do think it's going to get progressively more expensive, harder to use, buggier, and generally be more user-hostile.
> I'm not totally sure if Figma will suffer a similar fate
I strongly suspect not. It's in a lot more use than Fireworks (which was cool -I used it- but was always a bit "niche").
If they play their cards right, they can use it to leverage their way back into many designers' good graces (who had been leaving the Adobesphere for the Figmasphere). They would probably add ways to leverage their cloud storage and other apps.
That said, it's pretty much a textbook "buy the competition" move, and the kind of thing that's getting a lot of scrutiny from regulators, these days.
But $20B is a lot of yachts. I don't blame the Figma people for selling out.
I still use Fireworks CS6 for one-off mockups. I don't specialize in design myself, but I think that's exactly why I like using it - its UI is intuitive and simple. I've tried newer/maintained vector editors like Inkscape and Krita, and still feel like there's a void left by Fireworks for casual users like myself.
I thought I was one of the last Fireworks users and I gave it up a few years ago in favor of Sketch!
Once I learn a tool well enough to suit my needs, I really hate giving it up so it was a difficult transition. Probably why I never bothered abandoning Sketch in favor of Figma.
I've used all of these tools as well. Recently I was clinging to the side of Sketch with white knuckles while bringing over stuff from photoshop and illustrator and exporting to zeplin. The process was cumbersome but created excellent results. But I finally forced myself to check out figma.
Within about two weeks I never looked back.
For me, figma was just SO much better. Some of the behaviors are so head-smackingly, "Oh my god, why doesn't Illustrator do that?!" it's nuts.
I still need PS and Illustrator on occasion, but for embracing Figma I was able to dump 2 programs (Sketch/Zeplin) and actually improve my company's overall design consistency and brand like never before. And I use the Adobe products - which I've used for over 30 years - so much less, it's stunning.
I must sound like an advertisement, but figma has been a total life/career-changer. The news of the acquisition this morning slapped me hard. I fear the unknown. I remember what happened to Macromedia, too.
Sketch is ideal Fireworks replacement. I clinged to Fireworks for years after it was abandoned, and when I found Sketch, I never looked back. Every little thing that ever bothered me in Fireworks, they made just right.
I'm in exactly the same boat. It's such a shame that AFAIK nothing can import .fw.png files and keep them editable; I'll need to manually export everything to .psd before I eventually have to upgrade my OS.
Same boat. Wondering what it takes to either VM Mojave or get a windows license and VM that. And this whole episode has made me definitely appreciate the merits of Windows backward compatibility as a feature...
They literally did the same thing with dreamweaver as well. And now dreamweaver is a fast growing business in the form of Webflow.
It’s the same story over and over again. Adobe acquires and then stifles innovation. 10 years later we realize what we were missing out on when a challenger eventually gets big enough—-until Adobe kills that company too.
I’d bet a nice chunk of money that Webflow is next.
I don't think so. Webflow is all marketing and PR IMO.
The issue with Webflow is that GUI-based web design that exports static HTML files doesn't fit with how most large websites are coded and deployed. It would be one thing if Webflow CMS and Ecommerce was gaining market share vs Squarespace and Wix, but I don't know if that's really happening.
When I go on Twitter, I mostly see PR-type posts about Webflow. Lots of "Webflow experts" but few real companies that are willing to build large sites with it.
Once static site generators + headless CMS's became all the rage among enterprise IT types, that opened the door to Webflow...since Webflow is basically a GUI-based static site generator + headless CMS.
If you ask the engineering team, they'll build the marketing site into a complicated monstrosity on Gatsby + Contentful, and then never allow you to touch it again. You'll need to go through them to make any changes--and they'll be busy with real product work.
If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster).
There's limitations for sure (eg. multi-lingual sites, nested directory URL structure, etc), but within a few years I'm guessing those will be solved and the adoption will be even more dramatic.
Although Webflow seems to be stupidly focusing on the whole "No code" Twitter circle-jerk with Logic/memberships, so they may get disrupted by Framer in the meantime however.
> If you build on Webflow, you're basically doing the same thing, but putting ownership of the marketing site squarely inside the marketing org (who likely has people who's time is less expensive able to do what you need in Webflow...and faster).
Fair enough. I still don't think Webflow CMS is going to make much of a dent in this market (even though I think their GUI is much better than Wix/Squarespace). The charts in the site builder report link, even being 2 years old, suggest they're well behind even obscure platforms like Google Sites.
Every webflow site means paying customer (and professional setting). It's pretty expected that free builders like Google Sites will have more websites. The question is how many of them are high quality.
If you look at the 2 year old data - Webflow already had more sites in top 1 milion websites than WIX.
I would expect change in market share to be faster for design tools than CMS systems / web builders, as the barrier to adoption is lower for design tools, however, change does happen when innovation addresses under-served market needs and delivers greater value against those needs. Framer, Webflow, Jotform and others seem to be on a path to doing just that. Here's a chart that shows Figma's rise against competitors: https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*gdeNbC57BJKydbYQjNdqOg.pn...
Maybe it depends on country but Webflow has massive adoption around here. Every agency is becoming webflow agency because they can teach their designers to create small to medium sized websites without coding. You can't create custom unique branded websites without coding with any other tool. It got to a point where clients themselves require webflow because it means easy, cheap, fast visual changes.
Wix had to rush to create their Editor X which is direct Webflow competition.
Yes it won't replace big sites that require complex CMSes and publishing flows. But it certainly has a niche.
TBH i think it will be super interesting if somebody made some kind of more open webflow style html/css editor that could be integrated to current CMSes and workflows. Like sections of pages that are handcrafted like this. Or your header/footer and blog are CMS but landing page is this super visual html/cms editor.
I remember how Fireworks *felt* to use. Just seeing that name written again gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Fireworks came about at a time when web design was almost entirely something you did in HTML. The workflow to go from bitmap to web was really bad, so most of us just did things natively.
Fireworks was the first tool that allowed you to draw, but maintain the constraints (and portability) of HTML and CSS as it came in to prominence.
The closest thing I have had to that feeling again was when a friend of mine did some design for me and shared it in Figma. What I thought were bitmaps were vectors!! I had so much fun bringing that in to my site (which I ended up doing in Webflow, because apparently I haven't kept up with the times enough to hand code reasonably quickly).
I've used the latest and greatest Adobe products, they definitively do not have this feeling. There is really no delight to be found. I know they are incredibly powerful and near and dear to many people, but for the young and restless they are boring.
I was part of the first wave of animators who found Flash and mucked around in it - I made a cartoon early on that went viral before that was a thing.
An exe file as an attachment to an email, that went round the world. Crazy days.
Ah, Fireworks brings back good memories. I used Fireworks way back in high school to design websites - you could throw together a basic multi-page website with a clickable/hoverable image navbar in literally minutes, no code required. And it looked good too, at least by the standards of the early 2000s.
Later, I did the vast majority of the visuals I used throughout my PhD in Fireworks CS6, long after it had been abandoned by Adobe. It was fast, faster than Photoshop or Illustrator is today. The shape libraries meant that doing diagrams and illustrations was a breeze - these days I do most of that in Keynote/Powerpoint, with much poorer bitmap editing support. Photoshop and Illustrator are simply too big and slow for quick-and-dirty editing tasks.
The thing that ultimately killed Fireworks for me was that it crashed more frequently every time I updated macOS, to the point where it simply would no longer launch. For a couple of years I maintained a set of binary patches to Fireworks CS6 to work around startup crashes and such, but that ultimately got to be too time-consuming to keep up with.
I don't think I've ever been as productive in any other image editing software. Photopea gets surprisingly close for me - despite being a Photoshop clone, it's both faster (just a web app!) and has a few of the nice features I miss from Fireworks.
In case people are too young to remember, Macromedia was well on its way to matching Adobe's application suite – except Macromedia apps had far better UX, better performance, and better integration with the web. There's a good case that Adobe would no longer exist today had Adobe not acquired Macromedia.
I still use Adobe Animate (formerly Macromedia Flash), for simple vector drawings. For example, you can just draw a circle, draw a line through it, delete part of the circle that is bisected on the line, then click and drag the line or the remaining curve to curve those two segments. It's so much easier than using the pen tool or having to deal with vectors in Illustrator.
Thank goodness interactive experiences now require a full developer team, myriad NPM packages, and an application deployment pipeline. All for a web page that won't even work in a few years' time when some script necessary for the page to work ends up getting removed from whatever template they're using.
>Thank goodness interactive experiences now require a full developer team
Interactive experiences the kind Flash was used for, can now be done trivially without plugins AND be compatible with the rest of the page (e.g. history, copy paste, etc.). For some basic stuff Flash was used you can even do them in one line of CSS. You can even play video, sound, and trigger MIDI natively now, with just a few lines.
More advanced stuff, you can it do with just canvas and at most a wrapper lib for higher level methods - no "NPM packages" or anything else required.
For casual games or animation, there are tons of FOSS and even proprietary libs, with game-building templates and GUIs to do what Flash did, and even things Flash barely did, like 3D - and they all export to native web code running on all platforms - even mobile. And with lower resources that Flash did.
All I can say is, good luck navigating the Minesweeper field that are the caniuse.com tables for browser feature cross-compatibility. At least Flash worked everywhere, even on Android.
I never curse on HN, but screw you, man. Nothing in my programming life has felt the way making animations and scripting them felt with Flash. You either missed out, or got suckered by steve jobs into thinking it's bad. It was overused, sure, but that's true of every new technology that's accessible and powerful.
Building something in Flash visually felt far more concrete and rewarding vs having to write lines of code for CSS keyframes or SVG animations.
Flash also just made it possible for non-programmers to build cool stuff. Today, that is pretty much impossible if you're not a programmer.
Programmers often aren't artists, so when they're playing around, they build something that may only be of interest to them. Taking HN as an example, I have seen tons of posts about people excitedly describing their favourite static site generator. Not much there for others to really dig into and enjoy.
And that's what we lose when the tools of creation are limited to those whose interests lie entirely elsewhere.
And aside from animations, it helped build the "landing page" nightmare - huge (for the download speeds of the time) pages, loading tons of assets, to do nothing.
Or the even worse "flash-only website" which just showed some text and images, and had nightmarish navigation, slow download times, didn't use regular html widgets, and you couldn't copy and paste or take a bookmark of your position in it...
The true neglect really started showing after Adobe bought the product. And your last paragraph could also apply to a lot of HTML5 apps, especially during the "AJAX" era. People didn't care about those things (and a lot of them still don't !) regardless of the technology used.
Indeed—however much it "sucked", there's literally no replacement. We've simply lost a certain kind of very-accessible creation tool for rich, animation-heavy, potentially-interactive content.
I wouldn't have a career without it, that's for sure. I made a cartoon called The Pygmy Shrew which went round the world and led to me going to Monaco to record Roger Moore!
It's a work of art because it was created by someone with a great sense of art - Johnathan Gay, who developed Dark Castle using tools that would end up becoming Flash/Director. [0]
It's pretty established now that for what we had at the time/the environment/and where the web was evolving, Flash was actually pretty damn good as far as UX for creators and the web has never regained that level of expression/ease yet. (despite all the technical problems and anti-open-web caveats)
I too really loved Fireworks (and Dreamweaver) back in the Macromedia days. As a kid then, it was really very intuitive to do all sorts of odd creative projects easily.
Riding on nostalgia fumes, I went searching for screenshots and in the process amusingly found: https://askubuntu.com/a/244128 - a Linux user still running Fireworks 8 in WINE. I'm almost tempted to try the same...
I just did, since I have WINE installed to run music software. It runs _perfectly_, although with early 2000s era UX conventions (i.e., very small fonts, some pixelated). Edits seem very fast, although it is hard to say on my hardware (Ryzen 7). As a curio, it's a fun experiment, but being a bit less nostalgic and more realistic now, I'd quicker reach for GIMP or Krita on Linux (on the Mac, I use Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Designer for the semi-advanced editing I need)... Although I do love this thing.
FYI, the download of version 8 was available to use as a 30-day trial, which seems legal enough today, if only for experimentation, and I actually have a license of MX someplace from my G4 Mac days.
I wouldn't be so sure anything will be similar to Adobe->Macromedia. That was 17 years ago and Adobe is a very different company today operating in a different competitive environment with a different business model. Also, Adobe's competitor to Figma isn't PS or AI, it's a newer tool called Adobe xD. Adobe has sunk a lot of effort into getting xD "right" but so far failed to make it competitive. This massive acquisition is Adobe admitting that the xD effort failed and giving up.
In recent years, Adobe's approach to mega-sized acquisitions has been to put the newly acquired company's management in charge of the relevant business unit, not the other way around. The users who should be worried by the news are those who love Adobe xD vs Figma (I assume there must be some). If the post-acquisition integration goes well, I'd estimate the chances at better than 50% that in a couple years former Figma management end up running Adobe's creative professional segment entirely (ie PS, AI, etc).
(note: none of this means you personally will prefer whatever the impact of that may be in any particular product.)
Adobe’s direct competitor is Adobe XD, which launched with practically no features and was slowly developed only to dwindle to death as a rarely used cloud service, while everyone does the important work in Figma.
The parent comment is spot-on. Antitrust legislation needs to be invoked to prevent this acquisition from happening.
It amazes me that people posting on a YC controlled board whose entire purpose for existing is to fund startups long enough to get an exit - statistically most likely through an acquisition by a bigger company - wants to stop acquisitions.
The funding environment for startups would be a lot worse if investors thought that the only way they could recoup their investments is through exits. Look how few of YC companies actually go public.
Even companies that do go public are often just surviving long enough to hopefully get acquired.
The founders at Figma chose to be acquired. It’s their product and their company.
Who said that? The point is that anticompetitive acquisitions, like Adobe acquiring a direct competitor, hurt everyone but the acquirer, and should be tightly controlled.
Nobody would care if Figma were getting acquired by GitLab or Salesforce or Atlassian or whatever. The fact that it's a direct competitor known for destroying acquisitions is the problem.
Why would Gitlab want Figma? Could it afford it? I am sure the owners of Figma thought this was the best available option. It’s their company - not yours or the governments. If they want to sell their property it’s theirs to sell.
Would Gitlab make it a better product if it was sold to them?
It's just an example of a non-monopolistic acquisition. There are other examples of larger companies that may be able to support it better, like Microsoft or Dropbox or Zoom or something.
DropBox isn’t doing to well itself if you haven’t checked. How well are their previous acquisitions doing? Would you rather have a company acquire Figma with no expertise in the area (MS)?
I think everyone would prefer Figma to continue to be an independent business that challenges and competes with Adobe, forcing both products to be better.
“Everyone” but the people who own the company, created the product, found investors, took the risk of starting their own company, the employees who all could have probably made more money during the intervening years by working for BigTech.
Their priorities and wants are a lot more important than yours.
If you had an idea that attracted investor interest, convinced engineers to forego BigTech compensation and created a product that people wanted, I am sure your opinion would matter a lot more.
No. But I hate the idea that people who did absolutely nothing to create the company think they by proxy of the government should have the right to tell others to do with their property. If you want a company that meets your ideals - create a company yourself.
Customers do to some degree have a sense of ownership over the product. Marketers literally try to cultivate that "sense of ownership" factor. Especially where there's network effects, or a marketplace ecosystem forming. It very literally becomes a community and a standard.
More and more I think we'll see companies have to signal their intentions and be lightly bound to their community, or see those ecosystems form somewhere else instead.
The best for the acquirers and acquired isn't necessarily, and is in fact rarely, the best for the consumers at large. Unless you want to end up in an abusive relationship in all of your transactions, governments should intervene to keep things level, competitive and innovative.
"history". Yes, that concise and short read that just tells you government bad. Do you have anything in particular in mind?
I really struggle to find an excuse for not wanting to involve government regulations in obvious cases like monopolies almost monopolies. Even some libertarians, who are far from being a logical bunch of people, agree with this (alongside safety regulations and sometimes even infrastructure). The free market cannot function properly when it concerns externalities, infrastructure with high upfront costs, monopolies/oligopolies.
Fuck yes. The government is there for everyone. I want to not be abused as a consumer by for instance having a single ISP, phone manufacturer, etc. etc. price gouging me and everyone else, and i practice what i preach.
In a similar vein, i don't want trash on the ground, so i inconvenience myself by collecting my trash and throwing it at the appropriate places. You know, normal "sacrifices" one does as the cost of participating in a society.
I understand why people like Figma. But just because you don’t like that Figma is selling their company doesn’t mean that the government should be involved.
When a group of people thought they wanted a better operating system and databases that can’t be acquired - they created an open source offering. They didn’t depend on government intervention.
Many of us think the VC approach to business has perverse incentives and is fundamentally broken, with large exits basically demanding megacorp purchases, who then hand large dividends back to the investors behind the scheme. No matter who loses, the house always wins. I post here in spite of YC and pg, who I both dislike equally very much.
Even though you don’t like how VCs operate, you are taking advantage of a product (HN) that is funded by them. But yet, the founders of Figma shouldn’t be able to maximize their returns?
Sure you could, if you have the courage of your convictions you could have a pursued a career in public service and worked for a non profit. Did you do that?
You don't know my convictions and are projecting them on to me.
This kind of abuse of power dynamic is directly conflicting Hayek's view on competition and on antitrust from 1946.
There's this modern ideology of reactionary fealty to every abuse of power like some masochist vigorously shaking pom poms at every market exploit and cheering "thank you, give me more!"
You know how utterly indefensible that position is and so instead of even attempting to do that you try to pry into my personal life and imagine you've found inconsistencies from which you mount a personal attack on my character.
Give me a break. A company buying up its competition to dismantle it is garbage and plenty of even Austrian economists agree.
Living a life a charity isn't required to see when an emperor wears no clothes.
Actually it is, you’re not willing to give up your comfortable lifestyle and trade your labor for the most compensation that you can yet you clutch your pearls wondering why those evil capitalist pigs aren’t willing to make the same sacrifices.
Anyone who makes a living by working for a private company and then saying the same private companies are evil, don’t have the courage of their convictions and are false clutching their pearls
My lifestyle is afforded to me because I trade my labor for money at a for profit company (BigTech). I am not clutching my pearls bemoaning the evils of capitalism while feeding from the very same troughs.
I’m not sure why you think that 100% market freedom ought to be this audience’s primary index of importance. Many of us own or work for companies that will likely be negatively impacted by this. Antitrust has been systematically marginalized over the last 40 years, and despite prevailing narratives, this is not necessarily a net good for entrepreneurs.
There purpose for existing and our reasons for coming don't need to be the same. Very few readers/posters have a ycombinator startup. Stronger feelings towards YC ideals would be found on the private ycominator channel.
The goal of facebook is some meta universe. Most users go on to write a friend..
How many readers and posters on HN do you think work for a startup where they are hoping their equity in a private VC backed company will be worth something? How many posters work for one of those “evil monopolist” where a great percentage of their livelihood is based on their RSUs doing well? Even if you do work for a private profitable “lifestyle business” that is profitable and was bootstrapped, I bet your company’s owners would sell their company in a heartbeat if the right “monopolist” pulled up with a truck load of money.
It's not the acquisition itself. It's what company acquires it. Adobe is the IBM of creative tools. (If not Oracle.)
OTOH being acquired by a behemoth company always feels uneasy for the product. Imagine an acquisition by Google, or Facebook, or Microsoft, or even Apple. I bet people would start imaging how Firma were to deteriorate under their corporate governance.
Ideally an acquired company is just left as is, and used as a cash cow, resulting just in the products becoming a bit more expensive for large customers.
I still run a 22 year old copy Fireworks 4 because of Adobe's shenanigans. Just this morning I had to crop and resize a 1 MB image for display on a website and was able to do that in Fireworks in about 2 minutes resulting in 15k PNG and was on to my next task.
A basic image viewer included in your OS can probably do that - and a lot quicker than two minutes! How does Fireworks make it so slow to open, resize, and close?
Most of the two minutes was setting up Windows to select Fireworks as the editor.
I have Windows 10. There is a program called Paint 3D. I opened it now and do not see guides or the option to turn on guides. I do not have an export option where I can preview different formats with different color palettes. If I had more time I could probably list other features Fireworks has that I have become accustomed to.
Oh and Fireworks is consistent. I can trust when I have a task I can open it and it will have expected behavior and features. The way modern software removes and add features and add and hides options on every update makes using the software a task in of itself, before doing the business at hand. I'd rather make my images and be on about my day.
Well, you can do that with almost any very lightweight app, including apps costing like $10 and having hardware acceleration and everything, like Acorn and Pixelmator (examples on the Mac side) and also "be on to your next task".
You can even fully automate it (well, at least the resize, you'll still need to pick where to crop) with both.
I don't think there's anything a 22 year old copy of Fireworks can do that can't be done in other newer apps, but I feel like that's kinda irrelevant. Some people would rather spend their time learning how to do something new rather than learning how to do the same old thing in new ways.
I used Fireworks back in school and from what I remember it was a lot easier to use than Adobes products.
How does this analogy make sense though? Fireworks was, to Adobe, some third-rate app that Adobe had to acquire because they had acquired Flash, the thing they really cared about. Adobe certainly maintained Flash - anyone remember ActionScript 3?
In this Figma acquisition, Figma is the main prize. They're not just going to leave Figma to languish, no more than they left Flash to languish. Eventually Flash did die, yes, but that was more Apple crushing it than a direct decision of Adobe.
Adobe ran Flash into the ground. Flash was developing at such a rapid pace until it was acquired, and then quickly stagnated. Adobe too way too long to get Adobe Air performant and the tooling was abysmal.
If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
> If Flash was in capable hands, it would have become a major player in the game development space, which is where most of its strengths were.
I don't understand what you mean here. Flash WAS a major player in the game development space. Flash games were dominant on the web for something like a decade, and a large part of that was post-Adobe acquisition.
Yes, they missed the boat on mobile, but that was more a function of Jobs putting his foot down on anything vaguely Flash-related.
And yet I still get jobs working in Flash, there's still no comparable program for frame-by-frame vector animation. A package that you can draw into but also rig puppets in. I'm rooting for Grease Pencil to catch up but really it's nowhere near in terms of fast usability.
That's not so say they didn't run it into the ground - I still remember the nightmare of CS5.
Indeed. I still build my game assets in Animate CC, export them with the Export Texture Atlas feature, and then have a custom built runtime play the animations in my game. It’s quite simple to build such a runtime for immediate mode rendering engines such HTML canvas, Monogame, Kha.
There's a recent comment of mine someplace about how much I miss the _genius_ of Fireworks as a combined pixel/vector art tool that saved everything to standard PNG files - which anyone could read since the additional data was inserted using PNG tags.
That and it being very fast and effective for Web design (miles ahead of Photoshop at the time).
This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.
(This is like Microsoft acquiring Github due to GitHub network effect)
While I too loved Fireworks and Dreamweaver, neither one had the network effect that Figma does (granted, SaaS software in the late 90s / early 00s was rare).
Even if Fireworks were to have flourished while at Adobe, it's not entirely clear they would have successful made both the pivot to web AND also gained the network effect that Figma has created.
> This is an online collaboration / network effect acquisition. Not a tech acquisition.
One could also make the argument that it's an acqui-hire.
If one wanted to build a real Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, etc. for the web, you'd want the Figma team. Nobody else understands how to build desktop-like experiences using the latest web technologies (Wasm, etc.) better.
I have nothing but praise for Photopea. Having used it in the past, it's great for things that I might otherwise use macOS Preview (or similar utilities) for.
However, Photopea is at least a couple of orders of magnitude simpler than the Adobe apps I mentioned. It'd be interesting to compare to Photoshop 1.0 (1987), though!
The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product. I’d imagine it’s a mature enough, well known enough product that you could say it’s already stolen as much share as it would from adobe’s cash cows. Potentially it’s the place users get started nowadays and adobe could leverage it by making it easier for those users to explore adobe’s other products.
>The only hope is that since Figma is subscription revenue, they will immediately feel the pain of neglecting the product.
I honestly haven't observed this to be the case with subscription software. They will continue making cash because people want to continue to use it. Meanwhile, if it were individual sales, they would actually have to maintain and improve it to get people to buy new versions.
I was heavy user of Fireworks back in the day. Looking back — it had enormous influence over where I’m now today. I still can’t get over what Adobe did to it. It’s like Microsoft or some other behemoth buying JetBrains and then slowly killing it in favor of its own IDEs.
Microsoft bought GitHub years ago and announced the "sunsetting" of the Atom editor (a GitHub-company project) and its official ecosystem a few months ago. The archiving of Atom and all related projects will occur on Dec. 15th, 2022: https://github.blog/2022-06-08-sunsetting-atom/.
Yeah, there's still nothing as good as fireworks at what it did. Figma is better in some ways with autolayout, etc. But fireworks also had excellent bitmap editing support.
I miss those days too. Built so many sites in Dreamweaver + Fireworks. But it's probably not the internet that has changed, but you. It's not magical anymore because we're no longer kids and because it has become normal to be online. After having to deal with 56k modems for years, every moment of being continuously online felt special.
I used to always check out new releases of Illustrator to see if they had caught up to CorelDraw circa 1999… behind those cheesy vector and free-font CDs was a vastly superior vector editor. (to be fair, they seem to have mostly caught up around 2010-ish?)
Was looking for this comment. I loved Freehand. It was so much better than Illustrator. Don't get me wrong, Illustrator today has come a long way. But I can only imagine what Freehand in 2022 would be like.
I still keep a copy of CS6 installed just for Fireworks. It was the first design tool that made sense to me as a programmer that wanted to think of everything in terms of pixels and object groups. I should probably move on at this point but it still does what I need it to do.
We still use Fireworks! I open it every day, and it remains a decent vector and simple image editor. Back in the day we used to create our web designs in Fireworks and then (before we knew better) "slice" them to HTML and export using Fireworks. Even after we transitioned to building by hand, we still used Fireworks for things like creating mouseover menus.
We used HTML tables for several years before fully transitioning to DIV based layouts. With CSS you could/can make tables flexible and that's all we needed for most responsive layouts.
>I'd argue this wasn't simply negligence, but a calculated decision to kill an innovative product because it threatened the profits of their cash cows.
Well, that product was also theirs at that point, so it wouldn't be threatening anything (profits of its sales would go to them anyway).
If you people people would stop buying Photoshop and Illustrator, then no, Fireworks was meant for other use case entirely (web mostly), and it had 1/10 the capabilities of Photoshop and Illustrator pertaining to their own domains (yes, many use just 10% of a program, but many must-have features included in that 10% differ from person to person, so Fireworks having that 10% wouldn't be enough).
But when these big corps buy and potentially kill products shrinking competition, where the hell is antitrust to be found? Like are the guys there sleeping well? Would they like a massage?
I remember Fireworks very well and completely agree it was exceptionally well optimised for UI. As well as the ability to easily edit both bitmaps and vectors, the combination of frames and layer sets nested within the frames allowed for super rapid iterations on layouts. The export features were super optimal too at the time. Rather irrational of me, but I took the slow death of it rather personally and never forgave Adobe.
I have such great memories of Fireworks prior to the acquisition by Adobe. It was my go to tool for 90% of all web graphics: simple to use, no need to fuss with layers for selections, vector + bitmap in one app, easy exports, and everything editable within a PNG file. Such a wonderful tool! I truly hope Figma doesn't suffer the same fate. Hopefully the $20B price tag, justifies resources.
These tools aren't interchangeable. Photoshop is for editing images. Illustrator is for editing vector graphics.
Figma is a multiplayer layout tool, which can be used for web, print, or anything else. The main use cases for enterprise are a) it's web-accessible, and b) the realtime collaboration/revision/commenting tools.
The smart thing would be to just sunset Adobe XD and replace it with Adobe Figma.
Nothing in the rules say anything about malice or incompetence. The most charitable interpretation I could find for your assertion is this line:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Of course, the subject of this is a user's comments, not a corporation. I suggest you read the rules a little more thoroughly before accusing others of breaking them.
Making 9 sliced graphics for the web is obsolete though.
That said Flash also supported a bunch of innovation for its time, and it too was obsoleted.
Maybe 9 slice graphic were already dead at Fireworks’ peak.
Figma is officially way more overrated than this stuff ever was.
Does anyone know a person who’s like, bonafide smart, using Figma? I feel like everyone I know who does “Figma” day to day is doing negative ROI shit. It’s like anti-R&D. It’s the ultimate bullshit job for non engineers.
One of the top users of Figma by time-spent-in-app in its early days was the founder of a little tool called Notion.
So apparently spending your days in Figma can result in negative ROI shit like designing a billion dollar product.
But hey, I used to have the same gut feeling…that anyone who does something different to what I do all day is worthless. Then I got older and learned my model of the world, with me at the center of it, was naive and incorrect.
Well if your definition of bonafide smart is that they’re an engineer, then there are pretty few. If you think design and visual communication has any value whatsoever, then yeah, lots of people are using it, some of whom are very smart. That’s why they’re worth $20B after all.
I like the community here overall but there are far too many discussions tainted by the implicit assumption that if (royal) you see yourself as valuable then others value is synonymous with their similarity to you.
According to the FTC the law states that mergers are illegal when the effect "may be substantially to lessen competition or to tend to create a monopoly."
Pretty positive this would lessen competition in design software and restablish Adobe as a monopoly. This merger should be blocked.
The FTC uses the Consumer Welfare Standard to decide antitrust cases, which means they have to show that a proposed merger would cause tangible harm to consumers. If "reducing competition" was the standard then all buyouts/mergers would be illegal since they all necessarily reduce competition.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Competition is crucial for healthy markets, and the only effect of buyouts and mergers is to consolidate business and decrease competition. If Adobe wants Figma's product, then they can do business with Figma and license it from them. Stop normalizing monopolistic behavior.
> the only effect of buyouts and mergers is to consolidate business and decrease competition
Acquisitions also preserve value in businesses that would otherwise shut down (now or are on a path to). They can create a combined business that's better than the sum of its parts. For example, Apple acquiring Next.
Pro-competition / anti-monopoly doesn't require throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Did they use the Consumer Welfare Standard to block Visa's acquisition of Plaid? Seems like the main reasoning they used was because it was a strategic buy rather than a financially sound one. (and the finances of this deal pretty much mirror Plaids)
That's what they have used in the past, and are not bound to it. If you read any of Lina Khan's work, it's clear that they'll take a more holistic view of the impact of lack of competition.
That's a good point, it's important to note the current FTC chair is working to change the standards that are used. I'm excited to see how that pans out. I think the lack of antitrust enforcement in recent decades is a really underrated problem in American governance.
Consumer welfare standard is not a law enacted by Congress its just something a lawyer named Robert Bork that was rejected from the Supreme Court popularized in the 70s. It was pre-internet and couldn’t comprehend platform firms like Amazon that price below cost for years to win a market and kill competition
There may be "plenty" of other competitors, but I think it's pretty undeniable that Figma is the "up-and-coming" (or maybe it already got there) market leader among "design tools for web design". I also think it's pretty apparent that Adobe knows this and that's why they want to buy them.
This is the exact same pattern as Facebook buying Instagram, and heck the same as some of Adobe's previous acquisitions, where large corporations buy out competitors that could potentially overtake them.
If antitrust means anything it should block these types of acquisitions.
Not really, no. Miro is a giant whiteboard/brainstorming tool. Canva is a presentation tool, like Powerpoint. To say they can be used for design is saying that MS Paint or Photoshop can be used to design mockups... sure, but that's not really what they're made for, and it would be a painful experience (even Adobe learned that, eventually, and tried to copy Figma by making the separate Adobe XD tool)
You can try to coerce those other apps to make wireframes & mockups, but Figma is much better for both designers (the layout tools are phenomenal and CSS-like) and devs (the exports are good, there's CSS code to copy, a bunch of plugins, etc.).
I've had various product people try to make mockups in Miro because they didn't want to learn Figma, and it usually ends up being a bunch of screenshots clobbered together. That's a lot harder to work with than being able to click on a particular component in Figma and see its exact color, border radiuses, flexbox layouts, etc., and then to have entire widgets, dashboards, screens, and apps composed out of these components and built into a functional interactive prototype that stakeholders can review and comment on and devs can inspect for technical details. Figma is really really good at that.
If someone tried to send me one in Canva, well, I think I'd just quit right then and there lol. (Don't get me wrong, Canva is a great tool for presentations, but not for sharing designs)
Are there any significant historical cases? The Nvidia and Arm one seems like a big deal (if it succeeds), but the others just seem like random low-hanging fruit. I feel like the ones that matter (ISPs, cell phone carriers gobbling each other up, the Microsoft/Facebook/Adobes of the world, AMD buying ATI...) never really get stopped.
I think you’re undervaluing the significance of the FTC’s everyday work, but I’ll agree with your the Federal government has not been aggressive enough in exercising its anti-trust authority.
Isn't AT&T/T-Mo a DoJ effort, not the FTC? I don't see the FTC's involvement in your links... were they cooperating behind the scenes somehow?
The Sprint one was also DoJ, according to the wiki.
I get that the FTC on paper is supposed to enforce things like that, but their track record doesn't seem great. It just feels like a zombie agency that used to have teeth a long time ago...
Ya the last big case was Microsoft. Antitrust is being revived after being mostly dormant for 40 years but Congress has never changed the laws executives and the judiciary have just chosen not to enforce them
Considering the instant response on HN was to upvote the open source competition and the fact many people are probably going to leave to go to a competitor because they hate Adobe. It probably doesn't lessen competition but increases it since a lot of competitors are getting sign ups right now.
The argument "but there are competitors" – that the very existence of other players in a market should preclude the blocking of acquisitions – is flawed and misleading.
For competition to strengthen a space, it needs to be meaningful competition. The goal for regulators should not be "more than one player in every category." It should be diverse product expression, improved customer utility, and most of all ZERO winner-take-all effects.
That last item (winner-take-all) is crucial to understand, and I'm sad that it is no longer a major part of economic discourse (as it once was when systems-thinking was more common). Winner-take-all effects often occur without an explicit monopoly, yet devastate the category and its adjacent categories.
> For competition to strengthen a space, it needs to be meaningful competition.
There are meaningful competitors to Adobe's design tools. There are quite a few applications like Figma with a decent amount of traction. The fact they will be receiving an uptick in users will increase their meaningfulness which means Adobe acquiring Figma is not lessening the competition.
Why do you think that other companies will see an uptick in users from this? Most companies are not going to renegotiate contracts, update all their processes and tools, and retrain all their users just because this got bought by Adobe (which they are probably already paying for other tools). This absolutely reduces competition.
> Why do you think that other companies will see an uptick in users from this?
Because the number of people who are saying "Adobe is going to ruin Figma".
While companies aren't going to renegotitate, freelancers and designers doing personal work will just switch to another freemium tool. And tools end up in the work toolchain by the employees using them and suggesting.
For sure not triple digit legitimate competitors. To be legitimate competitor means some very mature software / service. I can think of Sketch and Adobe XD, maybe Balsamiq but not quite the same. What are these 100 extra well formed alternatives?
Just checked out Penpot, it's pretty good! Definitely usable for daily driving although I'm sure looking deeper there will be some features I miss. Going to try importing some Figma designs...
Congrats Dylan. I remember riding caltrain with you from south bay to SF, watching you sit on the floor of the train coding a "photoshop alternative" thinking your idea was crazy!
RIP Figma, I've been trying to avoid Adobe products since they charge the earth for their products and free open source options are solid alternatives. I'm expecting Adobe to eventually price gouge us to the point where we are forced to find a Figma alternative.
Post C6, I was 100% out and only FOSS as well. Dedicating time to those tools have proven more than acceptable and on occasion I got to file a bug too. Of them, darktable and Hugin have been my favorites.
As a long time Figma champion, this breaks my heart. Every time I am forced to go back to an Adobe product I find it worse off than I left it. I worry that I will no longer see rapid updates and features that benefit me as a user and not the grater "cloud ecosystem".
Same here. This is going to do tangible damage to my daily life as someone who opens Figma daily. I also spend time hunting rogue Adobe spyware processes in activity monitor daily. Adobe destroys everything they touch and Figma was finally innovating despite them. I hope we get real anti trust laws someday.
but are you willing to walk away from your current job where your employer won't share your sentiments? Are they going to switch to a Figma alternative because of ideology and emotions tied to the change in ownership? Isn't it more likely that the product will work as is and businesses won't face any direct interruption because owner changed?
I think Adobe made a smart decision, businesses are locked in and unlikely to switch once something is deeply integrated to their application design workflows.
"Corner the market, and raise the price." In this case, outsource the former and in-house the latter.
I’m a freelancer so I have the luxury of choice here, but I agree there is likely not much that will change until Adobe cripples Figma enough for an alternative to surpass it significantly.
I’d put the odds at about 95% that Adobe will ruin Figma with bloat, 14 different “Creative Cloud” background processes, and hostile pricing models within 5 years.
This is huge news for Sketch.
However, to be honest, this is the type of acquisition that should be blocked IMO. Adobe is literally acquiring a direct competitor here.
To me the consumer harm is pretty clear. Instead of a more competent org (Figma) growing further to disrupt more of Adobe’s business, we’re going to be stuck with Adobe forever.
Great outcome for the founders and investors in Figma, terrible outcome for consumers.
As a cto/admin/manager/hiring person: Sketch is worthless for me because I don't have a Mac. But because of that, my company does not use it: despite designers working on macOS, if I can't run it to look at their work and actively comment/collaborate with them, it's not a useful workflow. Therefore instead we hire people familiar with Figma (sadly, because I wanted to avoid giving Adobe money. Well, fuck, eh?)
Because statistics. If you make one option less appealing (which is the presumption) all competitors will indirectly benefit, statistically, for various reasons, none of which might resonate with your specific personal needs.
Anyone here can lodge this simple form and I'd encourage you to do so. Especially if you think this merger will substantially lesson competition and stifle innovation lodge a complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
At a minimum, they will investigate this and make inquiries (typically within months) if they see a high volume of complaints.
2. It should include something similar the following (maybe a lawyer here, could help):
a. Adobe acquiring Figma may violate anti-trust laws.
b. These are the 2 dominate players in web design apps. There is very little competition elsewhere.
c. I am a user and once they merge there is no viable competitor.
Sent, thank you. I also made sure to mention the "consumer harm" (keyword) of forcing consumers to engage with Adobe's predatory pricing model ("annual subscription billed monthly" bs)
The antitrust agencies in the United States (FTC and DOJ) do not proactively give approval for companies to merge. After official merger filings have been made (which they have not in this case), the FTC or DOJ have a process in which they gather evidence and determine whether they have grounds to challenge the proposed merger. [1]
Nah, they just have different rules for different huge tech companies.
FTC is blocking Meta’s acquisition of Within, the maker of a VR fitness app - an extremely niche product. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe seem confident that they can close on deals to buy Activision and Figma.
I'm betting they will leave it alone, at least for a while. I'm sure the C suite at adobe is not blind to their reputation and they know that if they start tacking on "Adobe" features to Figma, user growth will stall out.
Everyone is referencing the Macromedia purchase but I would argue that it was a very different kind of purchase. With that Adobe spent $3.4B acquiring them, in Figma's case they paid $20B. I could see how Adobe is willing to throw away $3.4B to kill their competition but I'm not sure they would be willing to do that to a $20B purchase.
If anything they keep is exactly the same, kill Adobe XD, and rename Figma to Adobe XD.
Big company executives do not see the world the way you do.
Creative Cloud alone has at least 5x the users of Figma. I have no idea how to even calculate all the users of all Adobe products. I guarantee that a lot of people at Adobe see Figma as just adorable, but not really, you know, a product. Some people at Adobe get it and are hoping to revolutionize their company with new blood, but… they probably won’t succeed.
At big companies that have captured a large portion of the market, they are usually not interested in “disrupting” themselves. Steve Jobs was a rarity. There are far more attainable revenue and careers to be made optimizing the existing revenue streams.
If killing Figma entirely made Creative Cloud revenue go up by a few percentage points that would be worth it for them. Even if the acquisition has negative value the people who pioneered it have more influence in their company, and an achievement that advances their career narrative.
They may tell themselves they’re going to integrate Figma, and some people are going to definitely try, but if that doesn’t work out that’s probably fine.
I'm an Adobe employee, and I think that this is most likely what will happen. I think maybe the transition to web-first wasn't going as planned. I think that Adobe's going to move their features into Figma (integration with creative cloud assets, easy importing/exporting to other programs, collaboration workflows) and close out XD.
That said, knowing Apple, they probably have a great long term vision on graphical UI/UX design tooling that will either be great when it finally comes into being in 8 years, like M1, or we’ll never see it at all.
Oh well, so dies an amazing product to be locked up behind a massively customer-unfriendly organization.
I'd even rather it have been acquired by Google where it could end up being graveyarded, there at least it would, if it survived, have been more easily available. I consider it for practical purposes no less survived now than if Google had killed it.
Is there anyone who could have acquired them that would have been a better custodian for such a great product?
It's kind of amazing to me that we've reached the point where using open source is not a matter of idealism, but rather risk management to guard against the threat of product regressions due to consumer-hostile takeovers.
Though can I just say that Free software is a much better term than Open Source (unless of course you only wish to say the source is publicly available).
Its amazing how adobe isn't porting anything to Linux, despite linux being starting to be used heavily now in the creative industries with the rise of blender and tons of work being done on render farms.
Blender and Krita are really high quality stuff, so hopefully problem solved. But those teams are really small compared to adobe.
That has always been my selfish reason for using free/open source software. I agree with the principles of free software too, but even if I didn't I would be using it just so I can be in control of my own computing.
Not to be too inflammatory, but it's always amazing to me how people will ignore a threat as long as possible, then pretend it just appeared once they are forced to acknowledge it.
Cloud features are critical in an enterprise setting
The UX in my org share all the figma designs through figma cloud, I can quickly provide feedback and this is important! All designs are stored in the cloud, I can quickly go back and refer them when necessary.
I am not sure if the open source solution provides all these features yet, but a new startup can provide these.
I just signed up to Penpot right now and gave it a look. Seems at least there are a few things that are not in Penpot but in Figma:
- "Components" implemented differently so requires you to hit "Update master component" before changes in instances are visible
- Auto layout doesn't seem to exists
Probably more stuff, since Penpot is relatively new and FOSS, while Figma is old by startup standards with huge investments and a large team behind it.
Agreed, that is very strange positioning. Clearly they understood how Figma users would take this news, but trying to obfuscate or spin it is a mistake.
If true, congratulations for Figma founders, and a bad day for designers that were looking for a way to escape from Adobe.
I don’t think that in the long term this will give Figma as an ecosystem any benefit — unless Adobe will keep it separate from the main Creative Cloud.
This reminds me of the Trello acquisition.
As a loyal Figma user I’m pretty sceptical of the future. Hope to be wrong.
I used Photoshop for 20 years and really tried to switch to Affinity, but holy cow it's so extremely different. I tried finding a good "Affinity for Photoshop Users" resource and wasn't ever able to before giving up on it and using photopea (which is great).
> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.
As others have said, there’s really a missing OSS version out there that can compete feature-by-feature with Sketch / Figma / XD. Layout engine capabilities are the biggest missing feature in competitors.
Phew, I was worried for a second, because of [NEW OVERLORD]'s persistent track record of killing babies. So glad to hear that [STARTUP] CEO thinks it's going to be fine, in a public statement nonetheless! More than anyone, he must have done his due diligence.
Every time one of these "statements" happens I'm reminded of what Palmer Luckey said about Oculus when Facebook bought them, or what Jan Koum said about WhatsApp. How long before Dylan leaves to "spend time with family"?
He must know his statement is pointless. How many times have we seen big aquisitions with promises not to mess with things, only for it to happen a year or two down the line.
You don't drop 20bn on something to let it sit at it's current level.
They'll be integrating creative cloud and making it part of the subscription. I dare say they'll close the loophole on the free plan as well that lets you have unlimited designs.
> Like many of you, I grew up using Adobe software and it was a critical part of my personal creative journey.
Yes, it was the part of your journey that made you realize it was a company that made bad design software, and you devoted your life to making an alternative to it. For me, it was the part of my journey I was happy to leave behind to use your alternative.
I think it's okay if he wants to make $20B, but don't spin it! A blog post like this makes me lose trust, it doesn't reassure me.
Big win for the Figma team. Big loss for consumers who have benefitted from the competitive market. I really hope this incentives Krita, Ink, Gimp or other OSS to focus more on UI design features.
I think there is a value for Adobe to add Figma to CC, Photoshop can fully focus on photo manipulation while Figma (perhaps merged with XD?) will be target UI designers.
I'm a long time user of Trello. After the acquisition, Atlassian foisted their login system on Trello users, but otherwise didn't substantially degrade the product.
The integration with other Atlassian services improved. There is a variety of plug-ins now, and new ways to display the data for paid plans.
Do you feel different? Any specific examples of what became worse?
Yeah, as a Figma and Adobe consumer this feels like an intentional effort to limit my choice and enable Adobe creative cloud to continue to be more-or-less the only realistic option for design work.
I’m perennially frustrated that I live in an era with nearly-dead antitrust.
Adobe will be facing an existential crisis trying to maintain this monopoly vs AI generated content, AI augmented content generation tools and cheap image and layout apps.
Adobe has an excellent team of machine learning experts who are very well aware of what's going on. I attend their ML lecture series regularly and see speakers from FB, Google, OpenAI, universities, etc, especially on recent advances in large language models and their application to zero-shot learning and text to image generation.
Adobe has been unable to find technological innovation organically (To their credit, their stock price soared through financial engineering). Adobe has instead augmented its capabilities through acquisitions. Today's acquisition of Figma is no different.
And maybe that is fine. Adobe is not alone. Many big companies can only expand their capabilities through acquisitions. Those big companies are doing fine.
Specific to Adobe, the acquisition of Macromedia was a huge success in part because it injected a lot of talent into Adobe that stayed and succeeded. Maybe Figmates will be able to do the same.
> their stock price soared through financial engineering
Not disagreeing with your point, but they can kindly fuck off piggy-backing on the good reputation of engineering, which is about building things, not rent-seeking and gate keeping. It would be like saying Intuit is innovating "political engineering". Or calling an unpaid internship at Goldman Sachs "volunteering". I have similar thoughts about "growth hacking", btw.
> Adobe has been unable to find technological innovation organically…
In-house innovation is not the problem¹. What Adobe hasn't been able to replicate with XD or Illustrator is Figma's success with network effects related to collaborative editing and review.
In house innovation is certainly a problem on the product side. What new Adobe products have come out in the last decade? Every new product or service is from an acquisition.
I know Adobe is not really included in the typical anti-competitive criticism like some of the entrenched FAANG's, but this amounts to nothin less than what they do to stifle competition: Point to upstarts like Figma to justify an argument that "No, see? Competition is still possible!" But then buy out that competition to create a metastable state of:
1) dominance w/ noncom practices
2) -> disruption by a slight threat arises to threaten #1 market share
3) -> buyout of #2
4) -> return to to the desired state of #1
Oh hell no. Adobe is where software goes to die. Which is big shame because Figma has been great, and had serious potential to turn into the first WYSIWYG tool that would actually generate code you'd want to use. But Macromedia software was also great, and now it's mostly non-existent. I'd love for this to turn out different, but I have very low expectations.
Github gained actions, sponsors etc. and keeps getting more new features.
Whatsapp got E2E chats and group video calls and handles communications for a huge amount of people.
WhatsApp also got significantly worse over time: copycat features like stories which add bloat in an effort to boost "engagement", businesses using WhatsApp for the thing we all knew was eventually going to happen i.e. ads over WhatsApp, and the new privacy policy and deeper integration with facebook nobody asked for.
Stories is in a separate tab. I just ignore it most of the time and never post anything myself.
Accessing businesses on Whatsapp is kinda nice and convenient. I can enter a restaurant's phone number and see their menu easily. I also use Whatsapp to access bank statements which is super fast and easy compared to the bank's own app.
As for the privacy policy, it's like WinRAR. You just close the popup and forget about it. I've been closing the policy popup since months and don't even notice it much.
You're just lucky that business haven't started using WhatsApp to send you unsolicited ads. This is becoming more and more common in India - I received no less than three messages this month from businesses I've never used.
LOL I use WhatsApp daily and I completely forgot about Stories. I just checked, just one of my hundred contacts on there had a recent story update. What a load of nonsense.
Then Facebook tried to do the same with Instagram.
MS's acquisition of Github seems to be going okay, and has arguably increased user value. It's hard to say what MS is getting out of the deal, though; the mistrust of MS runs deeply given its history, so the biggest strikes in this deal are speculation about what MS is doing with the massive trove of Github developer and code-over-time data. IMHO the longer MS owns Github without hurting or exploiting its users, they are restoring lost trust with devs, but there are lots of devs who can/will never really trust MS or anything it touches (which TBH is a pretty safe bet).
I disagree. GitLab is a lot better and has many more features, but GitHub has managed to close the gap significantly. Before MS bought them they weren't even close to being close and had stagnated for years, and now there's a bunch of major new features (mostly playing catch-up, the only differentiator they have is Copilot), at the expense of stability.
IMO, Skype was on the way out either way. The P2P model it used only really made sense on desktop computers running most of the day with unmetered cable broadband, which is a very limited market, vs. the increasing percentage of mobile (and laptop, and desktop-but-4G/5G-connected) users that were a net negative on Skype's resources.
So Skype was looking at a major rewrite, and building up massive server infrastructure, both of which needed lots and lots of cashflow that Skype's business model just couldn't generate.
I doubt any other company taking over Skype could've avoided ruining it.
Not many people can believe this (How many C&C gamers are on HN after all?) but I'm still pissed about it to this day. I could replace even the Google Reader, but not the fun I had playing the games from Westwood Studios.
I completely understand; C&C and Need for Speed were an important part of my youth and to see them treated so badly has left me with quite the poor opinion of EA. But for some reason, their shitty way of running the game business seems to work out, and they just keep going. I just hope they won't kill Battlefield as well, though with recent installments they certainly seem to be trying.
with figma’s adoption as a standard, we gave up cyclical innovation for continuous improvement, and have a trade where technical skills are highly transferrable and highly teachable. the cost of bad stewardship of figma won’t just be the loss of a tool, it’ll be the breakdown of a whole layer of the digital design practice.
seeing that adoption of framer has been so poor they have to lean on web export as a selling point, i don’t think we’ll get another tool as powerful as figma that young designers are as willing to spend five years mastering and collectively adopt as a standard—-more likely the design tools ecosystem will look like the front-end frameworks ecosystem.
do you remember what it was like in the field ten years ago? even with promising upstart sketch in play, it was unlike anything i deal with today, and it sucked
243 times their revenue? From what I can research:
Figma took $332M in funding and has just $82M revenue for 2022.
Adobe must be betting on Figma's 60% YOY growth and probably see them as existential threat.
I'm dismayed by this acquisition but glad to see the near-universal dislike towards Adobe in this thread. How can a $150B+ company exist with this much disdain for its business practices and products? I'm guessing Adobe's primary customer base is large corporations who don't care rather than individual users?
I should add that Adobe used to be loved by us nerds. They always had management issues, I think, and developed a reputation as a software sweat shop I think; but back up until the mid or even late 90s they were seen as a high quality software maker with innovative products. Photoshop & Illustrator were untouchable, and they were seemingly inspired by and made best on the Mac so helped make the Mac kind of a hip "creator" platform.
Oracle is not homogeneous, there are cool teams and projects alongside the terrible ones. Don't mistake Larry Ellison as representing all of the 200,000 people employed by Oracle.
Sure there are cool teams in every org. What is the probability I will join one of them if they are very small % of workforce, even if you do join a such a team with great manager there is higher probability that will not last in orgs with bad reputation.
Also while teams have variances org culture is rarely so different. Toxic cultures , red tape bureaucracy, or how performance is evaluated is typically mostly global not localised.
That's isn't to say nobody should in such places, there are plenty of people who just want a paycheck and don't care where they work or what their work environment is like, these orgs are perfect for them.
If you are passionate about your work and environment, and compensation wise squeezing your current value immediately in cash is not your priority then most big orgs especially ones like Oracle are bad place for you
No doubt, fully agree with you! I'm only proposing to keep an open mind, because you never really know until you connect with the people.
I used to say so many nevers, "I'll never work for X, fuck them!", etc. As I've gotten older, I regret this manner of thinking my young self did. Always better to keep an open mind while still sticking to your guns.
Being idealistic is part of being young even when wrong that is good part of being young I think.
I am more regretful I can no longer make those kinds of decision anymore, older you are there is more responsibility and you are forced into pragmatic approach to life and let go principles and ideologies you fought for and deeply believe in .
A product line can be useful, longstanding and industry-standard without being friendly, easy-to-use or cheap.
I don't love Photoshop's long startup times, huge RAM usage and non-native Mac UI, but I appreciate what it lets me do. And I'm not even, for example, a graphic designer working with other people who expect me to submit Adobe assets.
Adobe is the new Oracle or Intuit. Somehow it escapes the antitrust scrutiny that other Big Tech companies are subject to. Buying up smaller competitors left and right.
I think one of the reasons I hate Adobe so much is that I genuinely like a lot of their software. They make great (if bloated) products but they make terrible managerial decisions. They’re one of the few companies I think are evil to the very core. They employ dark patterns at every turn. It’s not about providing a product or even a service to customers; it’s only about extracting as much money from every customer as they possibly can.
HackerNews represents just a part of the customers that use products like Adobe suite, so that's pretty normal that majority of people give shit about such things and just use what they were given.
By the way, changing processes and software in corporations is very hard thing to do as there's so much management/staff/human/distribution issues on the way.
In my opinion, largely because they own a bunch of industry standard formats, so any competitor would be forced to start by cloning one of their products. Once you've successfully done that, congratulations, you've conquered 4% of the market, in that one area (let's say a photo editor), and your software still seems broken (although it's faster, bugs get fixed quicker, and the UI wasn't designed by a crazy person or filled with 30 year old cruft) because it doesn't seamlessly integrate with the rest of their suite.
Affinity seems to have made some penetration by copying/innovating on an entire range of their products, but that's a huge up-front investment to grab a tiny piece of the pie.
This is really a job for antitrust, but modern antitrust is just a circa mid/early 20c legend we tell children so they aren't scared that capitalism could get out of control and eat them.
After checking out Sketch, I don't believe they offer a one-time payment option any longer. They seem to have switched to a subscription service now?
I don't use software like Figma or Sketch often enough to justify an ongoing subscription, so I suppose Penpot might be the next best alternative for users like myself?
> After checking out Sketch, I don't believe they offer a one-time payment option any longer
You still can get it, but only after contacting support:
"We can still offer Mac-only licenses as new purchases to people who, for legal or security reasons, cannot use cloud-based products. However, they only offer access to the Mac app, and don’t get all the other benefits of a subscription. Get in touch with us if you’re a company with special requirements and would like a to use Sketch with only local storage." [0]
Those options are all great for non-professionals. Absolutely go for those if you're not using them for your job. Have to see what Adobe does with Figma before abandoning it, though
I only know about GIMP and Inkscape for Linux, and I wouldn't recommend them for work-related use. As free tools go however, they are both quite powerful and feature-filled. Just harder to use and can crash unexpectedly, which is why I didn't include them.
I think Scott Belsky (bechance), Chief of Product, strongly influenced this acquisition! he's been the breath of fresh air and innovation that Adobe has needed over the years! As long as he's at Adobe, we're in good hands. Frankly, I'd be glad if my existing Adobe suite at $105/month covers Figma in the fold.
I do wonder if this means sunset for Adobe xD, which I'm totally cool with. This whole market was Sketch's for the losing, and I suspect at some point a merger with Abstract and Invision makes sense for them.
I’m incredibly disappointed to see this happening. Adobe has a history for stagnating products and really now that Figma has sold out, their team will naturally start looking for other projects to work on that the core members have life changing amounts of money and the pressure to innovate is off. They have beaten their primary competitor.
It’s funny to see Wall Street’s reaction to this but they don’t understand how much Figma is eroding Adobe’s enterprise businesses. I filled in a survey a few months ago saying I have been using Illustrator and Photoshop less for basic tasks as Figma was so much faster for those. It also fixed the collaboration step. I as the CDO, had dozens of people across our SaaS company using Figma, including the CEO and COO who were using it to design all of their slide decks. At the same time in my side projects working with small product manufacturers and HR consultants I’ve got them using it too as the infinite canvas enables thinking that other established software doesn’t (MS Office, Google). Usually Adobe’s products are only in the design or maybe marketing departments. So Figma was eating out Adobe’s core whilst reaching strongly into other parts of a company that Adobe struggles to reach. The Wall Street types who think Figma was just a pandemic boosted product are blind to Figma’s true position. Just the simple fact that you don’t have to install anything and you have something that can do basic drawing and design tasks is huge.
Congrats to the Figma team on cashing out but RIP in stagnation.
There is literally no direction this can go but down.
If there wasn't enough evidence before, this seems to strongly suggest your only salvation from user-hostile corporate monoliths is community open source projects. So... Anyone want to build a multiplayer design tool? :)
Sketch actually surpassed Fireworks in every aspect. After many many years with Fireworks, I was astonished by Sketch how they fixed every little thing that bothered me in Fireworks, and did it just right.
Oh, tried to find it on the page but must have hidden the comment. I've never worked in it, but played around with it for a few minutes and it certainly seems capable enough for solo or small team use. It's also the only open source prototyping tool I've found yet.
Boo. How come the big American mega-companies are always allowed to buy out the upcoming competitors? I thought you guys were all about free-market? Although I guess that's what complete free-market does. Oh well. For sure prepare for price hike.
But it'll be interesting to see what they'll do with the cutting-edge web app know-how they'll acquire from Figma.
How does this acquisition conflict with a free market? Figma isn't being forced to sell i.e. this isn't a hostile takeover. Figma is free to continue to compete. There's not a 100% clear antitrust case although the $20B buyout could be viewed as anticompetitive behavior (perhaps contradicting my previous statement).
Now they aren't forced, but you wonder does this consolidation of assets/companies benefit customer in any way. For Figma this is probably a great move to become part of the biggest design/image/video/whatever editing company - you get your pay-day as well join the winning team in the market. To me it just seems less competition for them, higher prices for customers since there aren't really options (eg photoshop, Figma for collaborative design).
But if FTC says this is cool, I guess we'll just have to live with it.
There is no financial modeling, CEO vision, or new markets insights that can justify paying $20B, $10B or even $5B for Figma. The company is apparently not event profitable. The metrics tossed around of annual recurring revenue are the typical fools numbers used to blind people with too much paper money and little sense.
Adobe seems to be playing the game IBM did a few years ago, but it wont fool investors for much longer. The only winners here are the VCs at the cost of Adobe investors, and I predict this will be the deal that will push out Adobe current management in the next two years.
It’s a shame that the competition authorities don’t seem to have any interest in these type of acquisitions which destroys competition and harms consumers.
Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly. Same will happen for graphic designers.
I actually think we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactive when it comes to super-massive companies like Adobe. Such companies have learned to be much more cunning when it comes to get around existing laws, and plus they have much more money than ever.
>we need new antitrust laws that are a bit more proactive
Bingo! Adobe has a de facto monopoly on vector and bitmap editing software tools, and it would make total sense for this acquisition to be stopped by the government on that basis. "The government" in this case would be the DoJ's antitrust division headed by Jonathan Kanter [1]. Looks like the process is to send a letter requesting a "Business Review" [2]. It's probably a "fill out this simple 30 page form, wait 2.5 years (max!) and then have your review request politely declined" situation, but I suppose it's foolish to complain before trying.
This isn't a terribly meaningful distinction. There are a dozen+ editing tools out there, most of them are pretty good and free. If Photoshop/Illustrator have 90% of the market because they are superior products, I'm not sure how much the government could/should do.
Apple controls something like 90% of all mobile phone profits across the entire industry. I'm not sure how breaking them would actually provide any consumer benefit.
>Apple controls something like 90% of all mobile phone profits across the entire industry.
Profits don't have anything to do with it though. Apple has sub-50% market share. Competition in the mobile space is so competitive there are few profits to be had.
If profits have nothing to do with it, then there's even less case to call it a monopoly. They nowhere near match the install base of all the free editing softwares (GIMP, Inkscape, Paint.net, etc).
Doesn't current laws require harm to competition to have already been made in order for them to enforce anything?
So Adobe acquiring Figma isn't unlawful, until it is proven to have a bad effect on consumers.
I think what parent is saying, is that we should adjust laws to be more pro-active, that if there is a possibility/high-risk of the acquisition to have a bad effect on consumers, it should maybe be considered a bit more than usual.
Current antitrust laws do not require harm to have already occurred to challenge a merger. Once an intent to merge has been filed, the FTC/DOJ has a certain amount of time to issue a 'second request'. [1] If the FTC/DOJ finds during their review of the materials turned over from the second request that the merger is likely to be anticompetitive, they will sue to block the merger. This merger in particular would likely be mostly scrutinized according to the horizontal merger guidelines, given the parties' overlap in a specific product/market. [2]
Of course not, I would be selfish and want the billion dollars. But maybe a culture of creating small companies out of VC capital only to be acquired by megacorps is not the best way forward for society. I also don't like paying taxes, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any.
What would the alternative be? There will always come a day when founders and investors want to move on. Retirement age comes faster than you might think. Even if you deny an exit strategy, the principals are still going to stop eventually, and the product will still come to an end at that time. Allowing a sale at least provides an opportunity for the product to live on, even if there can be no guarantees about how the next guy decides to treat it.
Traditionally, when a product doesn't want to be lost, the customers will pool their resources together and offer a buyout. That seemingly didn't happen, so Adobe probably is the next best thing. Adobe is a public company, so the public still has the ability to shape its future.
There are always options besides selling the whole company to a giant competitor, the difference is just that you won’t get as high of a return if there are fewer bidders in the marketplace.
A company like figma could have always just gone public if the founders/investors just wanted to get out.
> A company like figma could have always just gone public if the founders/investors just wanted to get out.
The company has gone public (or will shortly) and is now at the mercy of the public shareholder. Which is specifically the concern here. The worry is that the public shareholders, who aren't necessarily users and are only shareholders out of interest in profit, will see more value in squashing the product than carrying on.
The users pooling resources would have been the logical buyer, to keep out of the general public with competing interest's hands, but seemingly they didn't want the company, so...
I suppose I just don’t understand you original point then?
> What would the alternative be? There will always come a day when founders and investors want to move on.
Going public means you can move on and sell your shares at any time on the open market, they never needed Adobe to buy them out except to get a higher valuation.
Your original comment implied that if companies like Adobe weren’t able to buy out smaller competitors, the products would just die, which, obviously isn’t even the case here.
I guess I don't understand yours. There is no functional difference between offering shares to the public directly or offering shares to the public by proxy through Adobe. Either way the public controls the company and gets to decide the fate of the product. If they see value in continuing it, they'll do so. If there is more value in letting it die, they'll do that instead.
The problem with shareholders made up of the general public is that they aren't interested in the product itself. It it goes by the wayside, oh well. They never used it in the first place. This doesn't serve to protect the offering in the manner the customer expects. It might work out, but often it doesn't. Adobe's products themselves are a prime example of what happens when the general public has more say than the users. No user-controlled company would play those shenanigans, but the general public doesn't use Adobe products, so they don't feel the pain. They only see the profit pleasure.
This is why, traditionally, customers who want to ensure that a product remains aligned with their expectations pool their resources and enact a buyout before it reaches the hands of outsiders with other ideas. This allows them to put priority on the product itself, not competing concerns like profitability. But there is no evidence that happened here, so they decided it was okay to let it go to the whims of the rest of the world.
> then people were making over the top claims about there being no alternative.
Nobody said such a thing. I did ask what the alternative is. Going public isn't an alternative. That's what is happening. Figma is being transferred into a public trust. And that is the worry expressed with respect to its future, because the general public has no reason to care about the product and will not act in the interest of the product.
Anti-trust could, in theory, do more to prevent the general public from not caring about the product they control. The problem is that laws (where Figma and Adobe are located) are prescribed by the very same general public, so you have to convince them its a good idea. And if you've done that, the law becomes largely superfluous because at that point they're already on board and will act as such on their own accord.
> What would the alternative be? There will always come a day when founders and investors want to move on. Retirement age comes faster than you might think. Even if you deny an exit strategy, the principals are still going to stop eventually, and the product will still come to an end at that time. Allowing a sale at least provides an opportunity for the product to live on, even if there can be no guarantees about how the next guy decides to treat it.
This is what you wrote in response to the idea that anti trust should be used to block these kinds of buy outs.
> The problem is that laws are prescribed by the very same general public, so you have to convince them its a good idea. And if you've done that, the law becomes largely superfluous because at that point they're already on board and will act as such on their own accord.
That is frankly an absurd oversimplification. Shareholders are a miniscule subset of the general public.
> Shareholders are a miniscule subset of the general public.
You mean shareholders of Adobe? Sure. But the rest of the population see how it applies to their own shareholdings. According to Gallop polling earlier this year, 58% of Americans own stock. I speculate you'll find even more owning stock indirectly (pensions, etc.).
Or do you mean in other countries? America certainly ranks much higher than many other countries with regards to what portion of the general public are interested in such matters. Which is no doubt why it is more relaxed about such things. This probably wouldn't fly in many other countries, but those countries are not where this is taking place.
Setting aside the fact that your own measure means that 42% of Americans own zero shares, meaning that it is already not representative. The fact that 58% of Americans own a share does not imply that they are shareholders of every single one of the ~6,000 companies listed on the public markets in the US. Further, 10% of Americans hold 89% of the stocks in the US, and therefore as many voting shares.
So yes, I do mean the US. I’ll reiterate: it is absurd to imply that “the public” in reference to shareholders is somehow synonymous with “the public” in reference to voters in America.
> 42% of Americans own zero shares, meaning that it is already not representative.
You don't need it to be representative, just to form majority. 51% is more than sufficient. 58% provides a healthy margin.
> The fact that 58% of Americans own a share does not imply that they are shareholders of every single one of the ~6,000 companies listed on the public markets in the US.
Should it imply it? I don't see the relevance.
> Further, 10% of Americans hold 89% of the stocks in the US, and therefore as many voting shares.
Fun fact, I guess. I don't see the relevance here either.
Unless you're suggesting that 10% of the population is more likely to speak to representatives on the regular, not hide behind a computer on HN all day while assuming their representative is a mind reader, thus being disproportionally represented? I could definitely see that being true based on my anecdotal observations, although I lack the data to confirm.
> it is absurd to imply that “the public” in reference to shareholders is somehow synonymous with “the public” in reference to voters in America.
If you make the false assumption that the public requires 100% support to do anything. Back in the real world...
Ah yes, so according to you, in the “real world”, shareholders interests and the interests represented by the government are functionally equivalent. This must be why we have no minimum wage laws, worker protections, nor does the FTC ever block any mergers.
> If you make the false assumption that the public requires 100% support to do anything.
You’re sitting here complaining about not being perfectly understood over and over and yet here you claim I said 100% support is required. I said one group isn’t representative of the other, ie it’s interests are not reflective of the pother groups interests.
> You don't need it to be representative, just to form majority. 51% is more than sufficient. 58% provides a healthy margin.
Assuming 88% of that 58% are in actually in agreement.
> Should it imply it? I don't see the relevance.
You made the argument that the shareholders of one public company are somehow functionally equivalent to the public at large:
> Anti-trust could, in theory, do more to prevent the general public from not caring about the product they control. The problem is that laws (where Figma and Adobe are located) are prescribed by the very same general public, so you have to convince them its a good idea. And if you've done that, the law becomes largely superfluous because at that point they're already on board and will act as such on their own accord.
Your position is basically: we already live in an anarchy capitalist society with extra cruft.
> This must be why we have no minimum wage laws, worker protections, nor does the FTC ever block any mergers.
Uh huh. The public that directs the government have jobs and have to live in society, so they are quite concerned about these things. The public might also be concerned about the future of Figma, but other comments suggest that they won't be. And I tend to agree as it is a fairly niche product. If something like Microsoft/Windows, which almost everyone uses, was being sold to Adobe it might draw more questions from the public.
> Assuming 88% of that 58% are in actually in agreement.
For sure. They often don't agree. Just as we are only speculating that Figma is destined to disappear here. The public that holds control might decide it's the greatest thing since slice bread and make it Adobe's flagship product. The future is uncertain. I'm surprised you didn't already know that.
> You made the argument that the shareholders of one public company are somehow functionally equivalent to the public at large
You must be replying to the wrong person. Careful which button you press.
> Your position is basically: we already live in an anarchy capitalist society with extra cruft.
Quite the opposite. The public very much coordinates centrally. We just got finished talking about 51% being significant because of that centralization... Replying to the wrong thread confirmed. I hope you find your way back to where you wanted to be.
Until a billionaire or a Bain capital comes along and tries to do a hostile takeover.
If anyone can buy stock in a company, that means any entity can come along with deep enough pockets and buy a controlling interest unless the founder has enough clout to keep a majority of voting shares.
Going public also leaves you to the short sightedness of the public market. There is a reason that public companies are taken private when they need to make long term changes.
Also, Adobe can invest money in a product without going to the public markets for more money or taking out loans.
You can argue whichever is better for society, more anti trust, more big corp acquisitions. My point is only that the idea that without big corp acquisitions, founders would have no options besides walking away and letting their product die is preposterous.
That's the option that has been chosen. That is not an alternative. The product will soon be in the hands of the public. That's also the worry as the public doesn't care about the product and thus won't put the product's interest in mind.
> or sell to a new owner that isn't already the biggest in the field
That's not really an alternative either with respect to the discussion about the new owners potentially letting the product languish or die. It is different, but still reaches the same outcome, potentially. You are still risking that the owner doesn't care about the product.
As discussed, selling to the customers would mitigate this, as they have reason to care about the product, but we already established that they didn't express interest. We would never want to force someone into owning it.
> Your imagination can't be this limited?
It is. Hopefully someone with an imagination will come along at some point. I'm quite interested to hear about alternatives.
The “public” doesn’t give a rats ass about how good the product is and are very short term focused. The minute the company goes public, you are then at the mercy of “activist investors” not interested in the core product.
Perhaps you misunderstand that Figma was motivated to create value. A large part of the motivation for many startups is an exit plan wherein they get bought out by established competitors.
If you prevent such purchases, you eliminate a major factor in creating the value to begin with.
The point of the stock market is to trade and build wealth. Yet we have agreed insider trading should be illegal, because it ruins the game for everyone.
> Perhaps you misunderstand that Figma was motivated to create value. A large part of the motivation for many startups is an exit plan wherein they get bought out by established competitors.
> If you prevent such purchases, you eliminate a major factor in creating the value to begin with.
You're basically saying that they wouldn't have made Figma if they'd only been able to sell it for 15 billion.
Same tired argument as the "unless you lower taxes on the wealthiest even more, they'll stop creating jobs!" (Even though the taxes haven't been lower in history than they are right now).
People do stuff even though there are anti-trust laws limiting how many tens of billions they get out of it.
As long as there's insane profits to be made, there'll still be an incentive.
Selling out to the market leader, creating a virtual monopoly that harms the consumers in the long run, isn't the only way to make money on a start-up. Far from it.
If Figma had sold to, say... Autodesk for $15B would that be an anti-trust issue for you? What if they sold to Google?
I'm pretty wary of monopoly abuse. But I'm also very wary of entitled people (including myself sometimes) demanding that somebody else has the responsibility to create great stuff for free to make their life better. It's beyond my ability to create an amazing electric vehicle so somebody else should be required to do it and give it to me for free or else it is an anti-trust violation. Somebody else should make something as good or better than SolidWorks or Fusion or XD for free or else AutoDesk/Adobe/MS/Alphabet/... are harmful monopolists.
I don't like Adobe or AutoDesk or MS or Meta or many others companies. I disagree with many of their behaviors for various reasons. I think some of what they do is or should be illegal. But I think misguided consumption is more often the root problem. And it is a mistake to punish those who take advantage of misguided consumption in a way that encourages more misguided consumption and entitlement.
What are you are are describing are bad motivations. It’s like wanting a salary when volunteering. One doesn’t actually care about value if the only motivation to create said value is to get obscene amounts of money.
> They weren’t creating a company for the “good of mankind”.
I feel most VC blurbs disagree with that, although of course that’s not their actual motivation.
I don’t see how non-profits are relevant other than as examples of companies/organizations that do actually provide value in lieu of massive gains and profit.
And I think you missed my point as I was responding to:
> If you prevent such purchases, you eliminate a major factor in creating the value to begin with.
Because now that it's owned by Adobe they no longer have competition for their XD product. They will likely merge both, resulting in an inferior product. They'll then jack up the price, hurting countless companies that have gotten used to a better way to do their work.
But I'm very glad they generated income for their shareholders.
I would prefer the investors just get paid back plus ROI using the value and revenue the company generates, instead of the standard being just merging the company into a larger one.
Well, if you would like that, you are free to start your own company, find the talent and the like minded investors and take the prerequisite risks to create a company that meets your ideals. But Figma is a private company and the founders get to choose who they sell to.
Yeah, exactly right. People here are saying "I pay 20 dollar a month for something, now whole universe must stay same forever lest that 20 dollar thing disappear"
I think the problem with VC that GP means is more a systemic one - it's not specific or even applicable to Figma, but for other large VC projects.
It's fine if a company like Figma takes VC to build a good product that fills a niche that hasn't been explored before and uses the VC to grow and eventually exit to the general public market so that the investors get their return.
It's not fine if larger companies like Adobe can simply swoop in and pay billions to get rid of a competitor, although that one should be dealt with by anti-trust agencies anyway.
It's not fine if a company like Uber uses cheap VC money to price-dump against essential services - and yes, taxis are essential for those without a car, and the anti-discrimination frameworks make sure that access to them is fairly available to everyone, no matter why they would need a taxi for. Uber, in contrast, routinely got associated with everything from wage dumping over racism [1] to extorting people with excessive surge charges [2].
It's not fine if a company like AirBnB uses cheap VC money to wreak havoc on local rental markets [3][4] or to run effectively hotel-like operations in residential zones, while conveniently ignoring things such as fire codes [5], neighbors' quality of life [6], taxes [7] or that people (both guests and hosts) were and are randomly banned for "background checks" [8][9], a return of ages-old banned housing discrimination.
Society definitely needs a hard regulation on anything where VC is involved.
If a company could bootstrap their company and grow organically, they wouldn’t need VC funding. By definition any company that is using VC funding is pricing their product less than it takes to make it - ie “price dumping”.
There are already laws about zoning that should keep AirBnB in check. I’m doing the digital nomad thing starting next year. I am specifically avoiding AirBnbs and staying in hotels - mostly mid range extended stays.
> Those taxi companies that are their “for the poor” routinely wouldn’t go into “poor” neighborhoods or pick minorities up.
There's no reason to replace an already poor service with one that's even worse and requires a smartphone and a bank account, which adds a further layer of discrimination as about 5% of US households don't even have a bank account, much less a credit card, and 24-13% of poorer classes don't have a smartphone [2].
In contrast, a taxi can (at least by law) be used by anyone with cash, and the data about your travel is not available for police or anyone else to abuse [3].
> By definition any company that is using VC funding is pricing their product less than it takes to make it - ie “price dumping”.
IMO, there's a difference between using VC money to provide funds for growth (aka, a high-risk loan) and using VC money to intentionally provide a service at below-cost - five euros for half a hour taxi ride is not sustainable, it won't even pay for the working time of the driver.
> There are already laws about zoning that should keep AirBnB in check.
Yes, now after years and years of issues and complaints. AirBnB could only grow as large as it did by following the "better ask for forgiveness than permission" lifestyle and blatantly breaking all kinds of laws.
Cell phone penetration in the US is above 85%. Cell phone penetration has been higher in developing countries for years.
At least I as a minority don’t have to worry about a taxi cab bypassing me when I take an Uber.
Taxi companies have been breaking laws for decades against discrimination and don’t get me started about the government monopoly in regards to the medallion system in major cities.
> Cell phone penetration in the US is above 85%. Cell phone penetration has been higher in developing countries for years.
Taxis should be available for everyone, not just the 85% that own a smartphone and don't end up banned by the app out of random [1].
That existing taxi companies don't follow up to the regulations is a different problem (and one where the government definitely has to step up), but Uber and friends aren't even required to follow the same rules, that is the whole point of why these kind of services are so dangerous for society!
To repeat myself in a bit more detail: by law and regulations they are available to everyone. Non-discrimination is a criteria in almost all medallion / license contracts, not to mention certain laws (e.g. the ADA [1]).
These laws and regulations are, I admit that, often sparsely enforced and most people don't complain anyway, which makes the problem worse as it isn't quantified and shows up on the statistics that politicians and activist groups use either. A lack of data is the single biggest issue in fighting discrimination!
The solution however is not to promote apps like Uber, to which taxicab regulations do not apply at all (or severely restricted) and which just a few weeks ago entered a multi-million dollar settlement for over 65.000 cases of discrimination because they violated the one law that actually is enforced [2].
Well, we have an existence proof. The government that you wanted to depend on didn’t in fact do it’s job, a private company did. But you believe that the government will get it right next time?
They did not. Uber also got caught discriminating against people.
> But you believe that the government will get it right next time?
I have more faith in government than in private companies which have a massive financial interest in saving the money that compliance with anti-discrimination regulation costs.
What's the point of VC investment if the innovative products that are funded are snuffed out by large companies? Might as well not bother and save everyone some time.
It’s a problem that the MO of venture capitalism is just pump and dump. The only thing VC investments optimize for are exit strategies and not creating actual value. So I wouldn’t see it as a bad thing that such investments are diminished.
> Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford because they are paid so poorly.
Architects rolled up their sleeves and are solving the problem by writing open source software: https://osarch.org/
I'm not so sure about that, I know quite a few graphic designers who've either reverted to the pirating ways of their youthful years, many years ago - or have moved over to Affinity's offerings.
The latter's still a bit rough around the edge - I can't work with Designer (I've been using Illustrator for too many decades to), but I've stopped paying for old rope and nixed my once-beloved Photoshop as it's frankly a waste of cash. Affinity Photo's got some quirks and has a wholly different workflow that I struggle with, but it does the trick in the end.
As an amateur who didn’t have extensive use of Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign, Designer/Photos/Publisher have been godsends. Relatively cheap, quality usable software.
Could not praise Serif enough for what they’ve done. I gladly paid the license on Mac and windows.
This kinda highlights the real solution. Instead of investing in a product which will eventually get bought up by some monopoly and used to hold the users hostage, people should be donating to FOSS tools and/or paying for support contracts with FOSS companies.
Eventually the FOSS alternative becomes competitive and then outright better. It happened quickly in the SW space given that SWEs could dogfood the tools but it's slowly happening in almost every other industry as well. Blender is probably the best example while Krita (raster drawing), QGIS(GIS), Qflow(HDL synthesis tooling collection), FreeCAD(2D/3D CAD), KiCAD(EDA), Darktable(RAW editor, photography tooling) and Ardour (Audio mixer and nonlinear editor) are all catching up in their various spaces.
And there's a reasonable chance that some industries won't be able to develop their own FOSS tooling for whatever reason. In those cases it may be worthwhile for governments to step in and fund open source tooling (like the EU does) to protect their industries from the whims of a foreign company.
They do, but it’s not nearly as popular (or as valuable) as Figma.
In the last couple of years Figma has essentially overtaken Adobe and Sketch in terms of designer mindshare and usage. I don’t know a single designer (I know hundreds), that doesn’t use Figma. Of course, I’m focused 100% on software, so I’m strictly talking about product, UI/UX design. Not print or graphic design.
It's so fucked up though. Just because Adobe has existed for a long time and managed to squeeze their existing customers enough, they been able to stop innovating. And instead of innovating enough to be able to beat their competition (Figma), they'll just buy the competition and continue doing the same thing. Until another competitor appears, rinse-and-repeat.
Or didn't have to, instead improving what they already have.
I wonder if their aim is to own the designer's pipeline, from raw concepts to sharing finished work, nudging price hikes over time? All within Adobe walls and everyone agreeing to Adobe terms. I'm sure it's all fine and not creepy at all.
A designer recently sent me XD links to review, and for the most part it was a smooth experience to preview those assets and designs. She seemed to like XD.
Other times I get Figma links, and it's gonna be weird if they're both Adobe.
For me I can find one criticism of Figma. It's loose. Gets messy when there's lots of pieces spread out. Sometimes I want an anchoring page, latched, not zoom slippery... just constrained for my viewing control. Figma doesn't want you doing such things, it wants you hovering above a carpark looking down at the free and occupied spaces. That said, I haven't spent a huge amount of time in Figma, I log out quickly.
Announcing an intent to acquire a company is not against any competition law. The merger has not been finalized or even officially announced by the parties it seems. The FTC or DOJ will review this merger and if they deem it anticompetitive, they will challenge it.
> Same thing happened with Architecture software eg when Autocad bought Revit - end result is extortionately priced software that many architects cannot afford
I only hope Macromedia's story doesn't repeat itself: Adobe buying the superior offering just to take it off the market.
I don't know what specific piece of software you're referring to, but I think of Fireworks. It was never a 1:1 replacement for Photoshop, but for my uses (as a web developer, during the era of slicing up designs) it was leaps and bound better.
Anti-trust laws were written to address certain perceptions of how businesses operated back in the late 1800s. They were not particularly grounded in reality, and as such they are hard to actually implement as written in most situations.
Trusts in particular (cooperation agreements between competitors) were entirely a fad of businesses in the 1800s, particularly amongst more progressive-leaning Chairman. It is doubtful they would have had long term success even without government intervention.
We also know that things like predatory pricing and trying to undercut businesses to acquire them was somewhat of a myth. If Standard oil sold for less than you, it was because their operation costs were lower because they were bigger.
The enforcement of the Anti-trust act mostly relied on companies suing each other for grievances. But most companies never brought grievances about being acquired.
Fair enough. If the claim is that antitrust measures were in the long run ineffective, not that they were dishonestly pursued, you have solid ground to stand on.
It sort of was in the sense of Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, being much more aggressive and effective in actually bringing anti-trust lawsuits to fruition.
I used to be a graphic designer, have my degree in it etc before I switched to development.
Adobe's pricing is more than fair. At least compared to what it used to be, where you'd have to shell out a couple of grand every 2-3 years to keep up with major releases. For me, it worked out a bit cheaper now than it did back then, but I also got a massive, high-quality font library thrown in as well as a bunch of other newer programs like Dimension.
They already have a functional monopoly in the industry and the prices aren't too bad.
Also Figma was a rival to Adobe XD, which was already actually cheaper than Figma was/is.
Fam - we can’t even make climate change laws without oil lobbies paying lawmakers off…what makes you think that yet another corruptible organization in govt is going to help?
Screw all of this SaaS needs to die a horrible death. All of these webapps/SaaS products are just data collection apps that can lock you out at any moment. We need to get back to owning our data and installing locally.
Figma's value is ease of use. You do not need the cloud for that. You do realize that most laptops, and especially workstations have more than enough power and storage to do what a web backend does.
Yeah, kind of wonder what would have happened had Adobe instead pulled a pair of engineers aside and said, "Hey, we want you two to create a Figma rival. You'll have no directives from up above, have all the freedom to write the app how you want. You can work where you want, when you want ... if you need more specific expertise on the team you can take who you like. The first version you roll out doesn't have to have Figma parity, just has to be something you're proud of. We'll put it out as beta ... it can stay beta for as long as you feel it needs to be. We're hoping you can get us to have a Figma-like presence, maybe Figma-parity within three years or so?"
I suspect Adobe are too behemoth these days. A scrappy start-up/skunk-works within Adobe might have been able to pull off some nice code and for a lot less than $20B.
My understanding, pieced together from conversations over the years with Adobe employees, is that they do try to do this, and they don’t have success with it. I have no idea if they’ve done something like this with a Figma-like goal, though.
Adobe engages in all kinds of bad faith shenanigans and dark patterns, feeling free to abuse their position. They need competition and this should be blocked by the FTC.
Really hope they won't force you to use Creative Cloud, but it seems inevitable in the long term as that's Adobe's core business model.
I don't even really dislike their software that much (although it is somewhat antiquated), I just hate the extreme bloat of CC and the poor integration between their apps. It's really 2000s legacy software. Instead of bringing Figma into the Adobe system, they should make Photoshop etc. more like Figma.
My heart plummeted when I read this headline. I've done UI design work in some capacity for 18 years, and have always dreamed of design software with the thoughtful UI and features of Figma. When I realized Figma was that software, it was like experiencing a miracle. Software like this doesn't exist. It was the first design software I paid for (yes, in 18 years).
And now it's going to die. I almost feel like crying.
See, if this was local software that you could buy once and keep forever, an event like this would not have felt so full of foreboding.
On cloud-based web apps, there is no opt-out short of ceasing use of the program entirely. Don't want their new features? Too bad, we're going to roll them out anyway, and there is no turning back after that.
I'm still puttering along just fine on a copy of Office 2010, so my opinions may not be representative of the majority.
If this was local software, you'd lose out on most of the collaborative benefits that Figma provides. That collaboration, especially with guest accounts is one of the reasons for the explosive growth and popularity. If this was a buy it once tool that required IT support for collaboration it wouldn't have nearly this growth trajectory or industry adoption.
You can make local software with collaboration support. It is possible to make Figma so that you can do your design locally even if your Internet is kaput.
The central server only needs to handle shared data - and we already have plenty of protocols for that so that there can be multiple companies that provide that service or, if you prefer, allow you to self host.
URLs can handle the rest, this is why they exist after all.
Well, I can't quite get my Word 5.1a to run anymore. It was the best version of Word to ever have lived. Unfortunately, it only runs on 68k and PPC macs (on the latter even under emulation, IIRC). Software has a limited lifetime, unfortunately. Bit rot may be metaphorical, but it does happen.
I don't think Figma is going to die. It'll be bundled as part of the Creative Suite. It'll add buttons to quickly export your designs to PhotoShop or Illustrator or whatever. It'll probably get slower and clunkier.
I'm old enough to remember when Adobe acquired Macromedia. They slapped some new icons on Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash etc. then completely neglected them until people abandoned them. I pray Figma fares better.
In this case, I think it will. Adobe has been trying to build their own version of Figma for like 5 years. If anything, this probably means the end of XD and maybe their web versions of Photoshop. The Macromedia acquisition was a little different – Fireworks was an inferior Photoshop competitor, Freehand an inferior Illustrator competitor, Dreamweaver was outside of their core business, Flash actually got decent support until the world itself moved on from it (and Adobe mistakenly believed it could survive as closed source), and the rest of the portfolio didn't have much value. In Figma's case, it's actually a superior competitor to XD and even Photoshop in a lot of use cases, and it's figured out the web-based design environment that Adobe has tried repeatedly to do with mixed results.
I'd be surprised if they decided to shutter Figma. Now... ruin it by adding a bunch of crap nobody wants like Adobe does with every other product? Pretty likely. But I don't think they'll do what they did to Macromedia. I could be wrong, though.
Fireworks was completely focused on web graphics, and Photoshop couldn't hold a candle to it for that use case. I used photoshop for touching up photos and generating things, then fireworks for cutting up and exporting the graphics, in a time before browsers could take practically anything and CMSes would autogenerate versions for different uses.
Also, Dreamweaver was heads and shoulders above GoLive or whatever that app was Adobe was pedaling for web page design at the time. It lost its edge once Adobe adopted it as their main web page editing app.
High chance Adobe increases pricing & wastes a year of engineering resources on integrating Figma with their Adobe Cloud over building useful features.
In the short term, they've got to lay off redundant folks, join the new healthcare plan and learn how to work with lots of new stakeholders. All that comes before the actual engineering work of integrating into Adobe Cloud. That's a lot of organizational chaos, not great for shipping.
In the long term, I'd guess there will be a cultural shift away from speed. Startups are fast because if they're not, they die. Large corporations don't do that. Large corporations have enterprise customers and people who worry about liability and lots of politics. It's just a different mindset and set of pressures.
I can promise you it wont. None of their recent acquisitions have. Allegorithmic
Substance is extra money on top of CC now they've bought it. Figma will probably remain an extra subscription too.
Yep. Sketch can feel limited compared to Figma (I hate that they need iOS Mirror app instead of being able to access interactive prototypes on the web), but I love that they are a desktop app and you don't have to keep paying forever.
You've been able to play Sketch prototypes on the web for a few years already, also they just released a new iPhone app that lets you preview prototypes and docs. Their iOS Mirror app is pretty much deprecated now I think
Last I checked, I couldn't access the prototypes on a mobile device that wasn't iOS.
I just need Sketch to publish the prototype to a publicly accessible web URL like Figma does. When I needed to do usability testing, I had to use a third party service called Marvel that imports the mockups and publishes them to a web page on their domain.
What is the great feature of Figma? I tried to use it for illustration and it did not feel great at all compared to software like Affinity Designer. How were you using it that it feels like such a great loss to you?
Figma is mostly used for website and app prototyping. It's very popular because it allows for multi-user collaboration, like a Google doc. Older prototyping tools like Invision or Sketch did not have this, and it was a major differentiator.
You can create different screens and set up click points, such as a button. Clicking the button navigates you to another screen in your design. This is called "interactive prototyping".
Figma puts these interactive prototypes on the web, so designers can create a visual prototype that can be tested on mobile and desktop devices. It's more realistic than simply looking at pictures of mockups. The biggest advantage is that it does not require developers to write working code and deploy a whole app just to click around and test it out.
Not illustration - design (UI design, specifically). It's fantastic for maintaining styles/themes, collaborating, iconographic design, flows, and especially composable/configurable/modular UI components. The components are one of the standouts for me, as compared to other software. They are more powerful, and yet somehow less confusing/complex than in other software. In general, I always run into some kind of limitation or bug or confusing behavior in other software - Figma has by far given me the least trouble. They obviously have both enormously talented designers and enormously talented engineers in charge. Also, they appear to actually think about what the team-based UI design pipeline looks like in practice.
Edit: As others have pointed out, it's not so much the existence of a feature that's missing from other software - it's the design and implementation of features.
Edit: Their autolayout implementation is incredible. And their tutorial videos! My god, they're incredibly discoverable and informative and SHORT. I'm going to stop because I could keep coming back and adding edits to this comment all day.
Product (software specifically) design is where Figma shines. Auto layout, prototyping, etc. are second to none. Sketch had all of these features for years, but Figma’s implementation and depth of execution is unrivaled.
Figma's biggest strength is in UI design. Open illustration, while possible is not so great. (I still love Illustrator for this purpose, others may disagree or have other favorite tools). Figma allows UX/UI designers to speak a congruent language with UI developers. A design system or component library can be mutually understood. Things like, "we're using our 80% gray button here" can be very easily communicated. That's not at all impossible in other tools, Figma just takes it to a very nice level.
If you're a UI designer and you work on a remote team, Figma makes it incredibly easy to both build and share your designs with your teammates. It runs entirely in a browser and was built from the start for sharing, so you can jump into a design file and see and share the latest work in real time.
It is to design as Google Docs or Sheets was to Word or Excel. No more passing around files - everything just works in the browser.
Evan Wallace, the technical co-founder who build the Figma rendering engine and vector editor, is a web UI craftsman par excellence. Check out https://madebyevan.com .
Fair enough. Preferred to stay clear of Adobe and their trash subscription model so naturally I feel some resentment. Was enjoying the competition and thought Figma was well ahead of Adobe to be honest.
Figma is really pretty revolutionary as far as web apps go, both from the design side (collaborative, beautiful, and easy to use) and from the dev side (realtime multiplayer, fast stateful graphics with undo/redo, incredibly complex UI, built in a combination of WebGL, WASM, and Workers).
For a while before it, Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished with a web app, using a freemium model, developed by a previously unknown company.
As far as unicorns go, I can't think of many startups that have delivered similarly amazing value (maybe Cloudflare and Vercel?), and certainly none in the design space. Like Canva and Draw.io etc. are alright, but Figma is really technologically impressive (and beautiful, and usable!).
If you ever see a complex UI that you enjoy using... chances are very high Figma was used for some part of it.
> Sketch was the dominant UX/UI tool, but then Figma came outta nowhere and surprised the world by showing what could be accomplished ...
I use both frequently and Sketch is far better than Figma. But Figma had one thing really going for it: it works on every platform with a browser, while Sketch is (sadly) Mac only. Every designer and his dog might have a Mac in the US, but the rest of the world is a different story.
Lately, Sketch does show that it is moving in the direction of a cloud, but I doubt that we'd see a web editor from them anytime soon.
I haven't done UI design in a while, but Sketch was what I used for the most part. Worked with a few teams that used invision. I never really thought of realtime collaboration between designers as all that crucial, but I'm willing to believe I've missed something there.
Invision doesn't really have the editing tools that Figma and Sketch do, right? Like you can't easily wireframe or make components there or import readymade component libraries from the web, right? (like these: https://mui.com/store/#design)
The live multiplayer is cool, but admittedly just having an easily shareable link (google docs) style that any manager/dev/client can view and comment on was nice. No desktop app needed, no transferring files back and forth, just an evergreen link to the design. How does Sketch handle that sort of iteration?
Invision was awful, but I believe sone of those tools were there. Sketch I'm not sure, again I was just using it for hobby stuff. It's a decent enough svg groahics editor, but did seem a little clunky. I think the features you mention are pretty important.
(Just curious. I'm a FE dev and all the designers I've worked with have moved to Figma over the last few years, and you're the only one who's ever told me it was better.)
Somewhat ironically, as a frontend dev, I've never met a UI designer that really convinced me they were in-tune with designing for the context. If Figma did a better job of enabling them to design as well as they possibly could for the web or android or whatever they were working on specifically, then that's what I'd get behind. For ne personally, there was always a limitation in how the tools let me design for the responsive web, as well as letting me apply graphic design principles in a way that actually worked for that context. The best I ever got from a designer, even if I could admit that they were much better than me in terms of design skills, it was always hard to tell what was the reason they wouldn't be able to provide a mobile-first design that made sense. It was always some ridiculous large screen layout that they expected me to rethink in order to map it to various sizes.
What do you mean by "for the context"? Are you saying that the designers you worked with only ever provided you with desktop designs, no mobile or tablet views? That'd be pretty strange in this day and age. I usually get at least a mobile and desktop view, sometimes also a tablet view in between.
If you're not getting mobile designs along with larger screen views, well... I dunno what to say. It really should be automatic these days, but you can always explicitly require it from your designers...
It wasn't necessarily "these days" but pretty recently. No I wouldn't say it was always just a desktop view, but it was usually a sort of clumsily patched together series of independent mobile and desktop views like you describe. Little relationship between the range of sizes fron smallest to largest, and clearly it was started on the largest. There were a few other web based products that have come and gone that attempted to make waves, but when I tried them, they just made the process of designing mobile-first pretty awful and tedious compared to just doing it in code.
Maybe Figma got the model just right, but on the other hand I never really heard much complaint from designers I'd work with, because I'd always ask how they liked the tools, but they never really cared about the theory enough, because they weren't implementing or testing.
I see. That makes sense... yeah, the design tools still do struggle with a proper responsive workflow.
Some of the less experienced designers also don't necessarily understand the box model or CSS limitations and come up designs more suitable for print that are really hard to translate to a DOM (and result in a poor UX even if you do).
The joy of Figma is that it makes collaborative wireframing and prototyping much nicer, but it still can't produce full-fidelity DOM mockups :(
I don't see Figma as replacing something like Dreamweaver (which actually operated on the DOM), but more like a better prototyping tool than Photoshop or Sketch -- primarily because it makes it trivial to view designs and iterations on the web. That means the designer still has a lot of freedom to make designs that unfortunately don't neatly conform to the DOM... but that's good, because hey, that's job security for us, right? :)
The day we get a true interactive WYSIWYG, FE devs will be outta a job, lol.
For starters, it is far more faster, and it is not in the browser. I use design tools mostly to throw in some interface mockups, and I work alone, so I don't benefit from Figma's killer features of concurrent multi-user editing and its availability on multiple platforms. One other big feature Figma has is it's approach to multi-point vector shapes, it is useful when designing some icons, but not enough to outweigh a general drop in performance.
I also like that in Sketch I can control the app and not be dependent on some remote server to do the work, especially if server owners are prone to cancelling service without valid reasons - Recently Figma has announced that it will be unavailable to Russian people, regardless of their political views, which is rather ironic, as the vast majority of Figma users are very much against Putin's regime. To be fair, Sketch owners too had pathetically followed Figma and announced that they stop selling licenses to Russian users, but at least the old licenses still work, and if they would stop for some reason, the last resort would still be available: cracked versions on torrent sites. You don't get such guarantees with SaaS apps, you are always dependent on their whims.
Also, this is the least relevant to your question, but having followed the two products for a while I'm pretty much convinced that it is mostly Sketch that does interface innovations that are quickly copied by Figma, and not the reverse. So I prefer to support the people who do the innovations.
Okay, this is awesome - I literally had the thought of "Figma is so fucking awesome, what the hell would I do without it?" pop into my head multiple times today!
And now I know now why... Fuck! I mean, I am happy for the entire Figma team and everything they have accomplished, and everything they've given to the designer and the Internet-at-large community. But I fear this might be gradual end of it, hence my brainwaves going all crazy about it.
I signed up to Figma the day it was released, and it immediately became the tool I use for creating and editing vector graphics. Since then I have written well over 1,000 articles, and I can say with confidence that for 80% of those articles - all my visuals were created, edited or improved with Figma.
I have never spent a single dollar on the product. That was also one of my thoughts today - like holy shit, I can actually enjoy this fast interface, greater features, and insane amount of community resources for no cost?
This is an extremely sad sellout and a poor and obvious effort to monopolize. The fact we all know whats coming is a sign Adobe should not exist as a company anymore with the way they can treat end users/products and still get away with it.
I'm sure the people at Sketch are currently throwing a party that can be seen halfway across the world though.
Man, that is bad news for news for consumers. But also seems like Figma could have gotten more money? $20B is a _ton_ of money but it's the only real competitor in Adobe's space I think. Or at least the only threat.
> By bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technologies into the Figma platform, we can benefit all customers involved in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers. Figma’s community will ultimately have a continuous user experience across ideation, screen layout, interaction design and content editing, allowing product designers and their stakeholders to operate at a whole new level.
smart objects and cloud libraries, just kill me now
In contrast to the negativity here, I am optimistic that Adobe won't screw this up. The past acquisitions are not necessarily an indicator of the future.
Adobe consistently upgraded Photoshop even when they had virtually no competition. Their CC subscription pricing is actually an incredible vaue if you use it as a professional. Figma has a huge user base, and a team that is excelling where Adobe is struggling - collaborative cloud-first design software.
It is very possible that a 20B acquisition is in part Adobe investing in talent to address a gap in their expertise. This isn't 20 years ago, it is now.
Look at SO's 2022 survey, Java is the third worldwide most used programming language that can be used on the backend. This is after 12 years under Oracle's ownership.
Looks like Python, and partially JavaScript, are eating Java's lunch. I knew that JS is popular, but I have not expected Python. Do you think it's Oracle's mismanagement that led to this?
That’s too bad. Good for the individuals and groups benefiting from it, I am happy for you, but I expect Adobe will ruin this product for users. Especially since this is an anti-competitive acquisition.
"Dark patterns" will be coming to Figma soon with this. I'd suggest anyone running an Adobe product to check your outgoing connections while running one and then trying to block them. It's not just isolated to their products. PMS doing "market research" for their products have led students on to do work for them without paying them. (For anyone skeptical on the accuracy of anything here, feel free to email me at the address in my bio, I'm happy to provide evidence)
> Adobe is deeply committed to keeping Figma operating autonomously and I will continue to serve as CEO, reporting to David Wadhwani.[0]
"autonomously". There, I fixed it for you :-) More seriously, I do hope that this will become an exception to the rule, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I honestly miss Adobe from 10 - 15 years ago. It feels like they were a product company back then, as opposed to an upsell-advertising company (they are now). I don't use their products a lot these days, but when I do; I am always surprised by the slowness & bloat.
I'm not too sure why the Figma people decided this was a good idea - but makes me grateful for Affinity & Sketch still being available.
Incredible product, journey, and financial success. Nevertheless, I bet this was not an easy decision. Losing independence even with all the other great aspects isn't ideal. Just a guess, but I bet the prospect of doing layoffs compared to selling played a role. Gitlab/Monday are public comps and currently worth less than Figma's last valuation.
Since this is a thread of Adobe and some people might know this:
In the late 80s and 90s many of the window managers were based on PostScript. Sun News was an extension of PostScript and Next was based on Display PostScript.
How did licensing work back then. Could Sun have OpenSource News? I mean it did implement PostScript but my understanding is they were not using actual Adobe code.
I don't know if there were libraries or things like that provided by Adobe that was included in News.
> Is it even possible to license a standard?
Its the age old question of software interfaces right?
My assumption would that if Sun had their own implementation with no code from Adobe, they should be able to open it up. But unlike that that is something Adobe would have liked.
At the time I saw claims that licensing was the reason for the switch, it makes sense but don't know of any 1st hand sources. PDF was free of royalties so it probably made sense to switch as they reworked NeXTSTEP into OS X.
Not sure how I feel about this. Figma is great and all their feature releases have been impressive, but I feel it was due to competition and worry about similar products coming in from big corporations (like Adobe XD). I feel this competition really push Figma hard.
Now being part of the same owner, just makes it feel like any aggressive progress will just stall out.
In at least less than 1 year or two, Dylan Field will leave Adobe / Figma.
This is the entire operation of how companies with tons of VC capital just work.
Now I see commenters complaining about 'anti-trust', 'anti-competition', etc. Given that you are now doing this, why not also complain about the very practises that violate anti-trust laws and anti-competition laws regularly done by Big Tech in general by blocking those deals and giving massive fines in the billions which will deter these sort of acquisitions and anti-competitive behaviour, like what happened to Plaid and VISA for example and the up-coming investigations into the Microsoft, Activision-Blizzard acquisition, etc.
We should not turn a blind eye on this and do nothing because it is Amazon, Google, Microsoft, VISA, or even Adobe or any other company that is part of Big Tech and does acquisitions like this.
I didn't know adobe was so hated. They're still my best example for software making. I'm not a designer, and three times in my life I've had design needs that I tried to solve using free (as in beer) software, and it just never worked well. Adobe always just worked and fast.
First time was a book that had to be made ready for publication quickly (InDesign - my intro to paid adobe software), second time was 4k video editing (here I truly tried so many alternatives, free & paid), third time was basic motion graphics (after effects is brilliant and easy). Their software costs a lot of money though -- maybe their payment plans are what have made people bitter. I dislike the plans too. Maybe I came to adobe late, but I love their software.
Out of all the shady organizations that charge my card when I don't expect it, I mind adobe the least.
> By bringing powerful capabilities from Adobe’s imaging, photography, illustration, video, 3D and font technologies into the Figma platform, we can benefit all customers involved in the product design process, from designers to product managers to developers. Figma’s community will ultimately have a continuous user experience across ideation, screen layout, interaction design and content editing, allowing product designers and their stakeholders to operate at a whole new level.
Adobe's clueless middle managers are already adding "push my useless pet feature to keep my chair busy" into their OKRs.
Basically, they are an orc army to be unleashed to destroy one of Adobe's few viable competitors. Like mafia thugs with a baseball bat.
for what its worth @zoink says they'll still be autonomous https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1570385560312909826 and he doesnt seem like the kinda guy to lie about it (even if this might change 1-3 years down the road)
Even if it holds for a couple years, there's still the corrosive effect it has on morale and productivity as the surrounding company's broken culture seeps in and most of the high quality employees just either rest & vest or flee the vacating ship.
The founders will stick around and play middle mgmt until their agreements run out, then leave ASAP. You know it's really bad if they leave before those agreements are done.
> for what its worth @zoink says they'll still be autonomous ... and he doesnt seem like the kinda guy to lie about it (even if this might change 1-3 years down the road)
Dylan's tweet is bullshit. You know it. We know it. $20 billion (with a B) is a very good chunk of money, and Dylan has a golden parachute prepared when Adobe, "1-3 to years down the road," cannibalizes, rebuilds, and rebrands Figma into an overpriced and bloated monstrosity.
Every founder says that, then suddenly you're saying Aaron Swartz wasn't a cofounder and that you're not to be considered the "bastion of free speech".
Well, lets see what happens. But it doesn't bode well when Adobe is saying they'll add features for photography (wtf?) into Figma, when that's not what the tool is about at all.
I dare say they will be autonomous for a year. Then Adobe will want some ROI and start slapping creative cloud crap into it.
I'd imaging it'll be added to the CCX launcher pretty quickly and made the only way to download it. Thankfully because it's electron it shouldn't be too hard for a 3rd party client to be made.
Surprised to see all the "hate" for Adobe. They provide an awesome suite of products only $55 per month. I've had nothing but good experiences with them. Is it wrong to pay for software when you get a truckload of value out of it? No other creative software even comes close.
Figma doesn't come close - it blows Adobe out of the water. I don't need a "suite", I need to design software. Figma lets me do that for $15 per month, and, from experience, is miles ahead of Adobe XD.
The founders of Figma must be very happy: "Adobe announced it has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Figma, a leading web-first collaborative design platform, for approximately $20 billion in cash and stock."
Everyone should remember that the blog Steve Jobs wrote criticizing Adobes security was deleted at the start of the pandemic in June, 2020.
From the blog “Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.“
If I had to pick a single product that I thought could upend an entrenched competitor, this was it. Congrats to everyone who benefitted, but it's a bit of a letdown to see them go this route and give up the opportunity to build a lasting company.
I also hate Adobe with all my heart! Had the displeasure to work there for a few months and the company is super lame. They don't build anything at this point and just sell overpriced subscriptions. I basically ran from there... not for me.
Adobe consolidates. Where is the Blender equivalent for Photoshop? I don't think GIMP is the answer, but it seems like Photoshop is ripe for an open source competitor in the category. I just don't know of any realistic candidates.
It was photopea.com, but he went to a subscription model too. Free with ads, but they're pretty distracting to me.
Affinity products are decent, but they're not free, it's a one time purchase.
There's Krita, which is good, but I really want something that mirrors the traditional tool layout of Photoshop. Both affinity and Krita do their own thing which is tough when you've been using Photoshop for 25 years.
“ In my work, there's constant discussion about which is the best and hottest new design tool to use. I’ve tried many of them, but in the end I still keep coming back to Keynote. It’s easy to learn and use, swapping assets is a breeze (using media placeholder), and most complex animations can be tested with Magic Move (the secret sauce to it all). Producing animations can span a range of fidelities; I can produce all the assets in Keynote, or I can copy out of Illustrator or drag and drop from Sketch (how seamless this works puts a smile on my face every time). As an interaction or visual designer, if you’re not using Keynote to test and bring your work to life, then I think you should start now! At least I hope this little experiment inspires you to try.”
> In addition, when used in this communication, the words “will,” “expects,” “could,” “would,” “may,” “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “seeks,” “targets,” “estimates,” “looks for,” “looks to,” “continues” and similar expressions, as well as statements regarding our focus for the future, are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. Each of the forward-looking statements we make in this communication involves risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.
I like Figma a lot, but I'm glad I have an old copy of Sketch to fall back on. Adobe and its forever subscription model will eventually get applied to Figma.
I have paid for Adobe CC for years now, since they started subscriptions. As much as I hate shelling out $29.99 a month for something I use maybe 5 times a month, it always just worked for me. I've started looking at alternatives, but it's hard to spend the time learning the new product vs just spending the $30 a month. I think they've tried to raise mine several times. If I can ever not renew at $29.99, I will probably prioritize finding the time to try other stuff.
A lot of antitrust sentiment here. If you care to cajole the feds into action - here is the public service email for reporting antitrust concerns to the FTC - antitrust@ftc.gov
Not a frontend dev or designer, but I've seen people doing amazing things with Figma and it seemed loved all around. Counting the days for Adobe to completely wreck it.
I'm not a big fan of Adobe. Many years ago, I spent about $600 on their Creative Suite. A few months later I bought a new camera only to realize Photoshop didn't support the RAW format, and I needed to purchase an upgrade to the latest version of Photoshop that had just been released. $600 software that I purchased less than a year ago and it was already obsolete...
That being said, I always wished Figma had the ability to import/export PSD files.
$20b? I guess hyper inflation is a thing. How long will they need to recoup the purchase? How many customers does figma have and how much do they pay to justify $20B?
Please, Adobe, please don't add Figma to Creative Cloud. It would be great to keep using it, I'm not going to change my file system to case-insensitive.
Figma has a free tier, which doesn't exist under CC. On the other hand, Figma costs at least $12/$45/$75 per editor per month depending on the level, and they don't charge users without editing rights.
Those prices are not far off CC plans, $20 for Photoshop, $55 for the full suite of apps. If they keep offering the free tier, I am sure they can include a standalone plan for Figma around $20, and add it to the Suite without increasing the price, and they won't lose customers except from Adobe hate, which I totally stand behind because I prefer having a competitive market.
Here's how the CEO of Figma went from a computer science intern to the head of a $2 billion company that's challenging Adobe for the love of designers across Silicon Valley - Oct 2020
Cool Edit Pro was one of my favorite programs ever. Adobe bought it and renamed it to Audition. I still can't believe how fast it went down after that.
You know who should be celebrating? Sketch and InVision. Sketch has signaled a desire to go multi platform, which has been a problem for large corporate customers with mixed platforms.
InVision failed to standup their own UI design tool, but the collaboration suite is still good and they were starting to death spiral. This would be an immense opportunity for both to become the only viable immediate alternatives to the Adobe threat.
I notice the overall sentiment is negative here, but Adobe is one of few companies I can think of that seems to acquire solid companies with solid products and a view to keep and develop them over time. Macromedia's stuff fitted into the Adobe ecosystem very well, as did the stuff from Behance, Fotolia, Aviary and Mixamo. As a long time Adobe customer, I'm feeling very positive about this move.
Adobe is a disgusting company. I remember they charged me $150 just to be able to cancel my fucking accidental subscription to their awful creative cloud.
Whoa, $20b seems like an eye watering amount for a tool like this.
I guess it goes to show how little I know about all of this, but surely a company with Adobe’s resources and prestige could just engineer something like this for less themselves?
Seems crazy to me. I guess it’s mostly about removing competition and giving people less options to not use an adobe product rather than the product itself that has value?
They have Adobe XD which is a desktop app, and my UX designer friends tell me it's actually a bit better than Figma in terms of features, but the allure of a cloud based Web tool like Figma that really promotes easily sharing and collaboration as the designer work is why Figma is more popular.
Signed up for adobe trial to use a feature of it that was not included in the free version. Forgot to cancel during free period, tried to cancel subscription they wanted a 120$ early cancellation fee. Charged it back on my cc and blacklisted adobe from charging my cc ever again. Sad say for sigma users have always heard really good things from friends that use it.
Wild to me that they are getting bought for $20B yet didn't think they could make it through this macroeconomic environment. Or maybe just too hard to turn down that amount?
Figma is one of the most vibrant platforms I've seen in recent memory — genuinely it goes well for all involved, including the users.
As much as folks may be unhappy Adobe is taking over Figma, I'm sure the team over at Figma are elated. It's a successful exit for a much loved company and I'm sure the hard working team that built such a fantastic product are being well rewarded by such a large acquisition.
Why is exit so valuable? Ok, money, I understand, fair enough, if your goal is money, and not company and/or product. It is Ok.
But I see contradiction between "much loved company" and "successful exit". Successful acquisition is death for "much loved company" or "much loved product" almost always.
If your company/product is "much loved" (and created not because you are serial entrepreneur for whom exit IS THE goal, but because you want to create this exact product), acquisition is like selling you child to slavery, isn't it?
I was burned by Adobe for the last time a few years ago. Since then, I avoid them like the plague. I loved Figma, but now I will be searching for an alternative. Adobe ruins everything they acquire, and its only a matter of time before Figma follows suit.
Adobe and Figma says that Figma will remain autonomous. I think if this acquisition is treated the same way as the MS / Github model then things will be fine. Im a little surprised at the timing. This deal must have been in the works for quite awhile.
It says a lot about the current state of the tech ecosystem when almost every acquisition is seen to be a death sentence for a product. What would a world look like where people rejoiced at these kinds of things? Well…we will probably never know, sadly.
A controversial viewpoint: Figma is selling the user data - labeled design, all for training the next big AI killer app - prompt generated UI/UX design.
Google had an interest, but Adobe upped the offer.
For the last 12 years I did everything to avoid Adobe at any cost (I used it from version 5). Creative Cloud was my biggest nightmare and single point of every crash of macOS and Windows that I had.
Not a fan of Adobe and not really a fan of Figma but they are things. Alot of people talking about Macromedia Fireworks and Dreamweaver etc in here is a bit curmudgeonly-old HN. That's forever ago now as far as web/design. Yes it was sad/and Adobe made a mess, but alot has changed since then that lead to the environment where Figma rose. Not to mention probably most of the audience of users that are really into Figma weren't even born when all the golden era Flash and stuff was going on. The youngins don't understand big business Adobe, and they probably don't like the 'vibe', but they also aren't totally against it if they can keep using the product they owe a lot of their career to.
They will be fine I think.
Adobe will use Figma as a bridge between Creative Suite and Experience Cloud for bigger creative/mkt agencies and enterprises. I doubt they will destroy Figma, but the focus will be different.
XD had a great start, tons of updates, good team communication, I really liked where it was going 3-4 years ago. Then, for the past 2 years+, a total radio silence. Barely any new features, just crash fixes to make paying customers shut up. At least I now know the reason.
I want to be happy for everyone who made Figma happen and their success but at the same time it makes me sad to see Adobe buying it. I am hoping Adobe won't mess up with Figma in future.
For once it would be nice if someone would value a world in which their baby isn’t ruined by a big competitor, more than a world in which they have 20B in their bank account.
1) Once you take VC money you probably can’t say no to an opportunity like this. It’s not entirely yours to say no anymore. Alternative is to retain control, but you don’t get the cash infusion and have to grow slower and more organically. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just a different path.
2) This is not a baby, this is a commercial product. If someone offers me 20B for something I created I will happily accept it. What greater reward for my work and my vision to create a product than someone valuing it in millions/billions?
Well, mediocrity will create an opportunity for a new thing to emerge. I'm currently building my own figma for board games, so perhaps I'll focus on it sooner rather than later.
No acquisition of this size should ever be allowed. Hard cap at no more than $1 billion in 2022 dollars. If Adobe wants Figma users then Adobe should... compete for them.
Like Oracle. Buy nice things because you can and you hate colourful light shining through te windows of your dull offices. Paint it gray and resell it.
As an ex-Adobe employee (not a fanboy, no inside information whatsover) and a Figma addicted I'm happy for Adobe and Figma.
I also believe this was a logical ending.
I was wondering and actively discussing what Figma means to Adobe and happy to be right on my expectation on the number. This is Adobe's largest aquisition (its Whatsapp moment).
Congrats to both. I wasn't the happiest employee, but I believe it's a great company for the creative kind and I wish both a good journey.
this is seriously sad. It is so hard to build a great product, and so easy to f things up. Given Adobe track record, there is litterally more chances to see things going south for figma
Good for Figma founders, they'll make a lot of money, bad for Figma users and design authoring tool in general suffering from the lack of competition in the space for the last 25 years.
I've seen what happened to Macromedia products after Adobe bought them.
Yeah, over the last five years illustrator has added no useful new features (at least for my use cases) and XD has wandered around with no clear direction. Meanwhile Figma has been a rocketship of features that massively improve workflows. I’m worried they’ll sink into the Adobe pit of complacent mediocrity if they’re bought out.
As much as I LOVE to shit on Adobe (they leaked my CC info) they surprised me recently with one new feature I've been begging for years - bullet points and ordered lists in text fields. Ever since Illustrator became an alternative to InDesign for smaller print jobs, it's been my core missing feature.
Although, in the grand scheme of things, Illustrator has been really left behind and apps like InDesign or XD have seen next to zero updates in years.
companies never buy with straight revenue. first it's half stock, so that becomes 10. second adobe had about $5b cash on its balance sheet. third they may have issued commercial paper or bonds to finance it, not in front of a bloomberg atm so i can't check issuances but it's pretty likely.
I think it's hilarious how many libertarian-minded people want government to step in with an anti-trust lawsuit but in everything else, they want no involvment with government. hmm..
Honestly my disappointment in the Figma team will be immeasurable if they sell out to Adobe.
You took us all to a great place and threw us to the lion. Could have had customers for life but I’ll be canceling as soon as you transition over to Adobe.
What pains me the most is they could have easily been the ones to make Adobe obsolete if they had vision and values. In 10 years it would be a Nokia VS iPhone situation with us asking how Adobe became Nokia.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Figma followed the typical path for a company/product taking on massive amounts of venture capital.
If you are shocked by this, please take note and stop investing in products and services (no matter how good) that are investment vehicles, not real businesses.
Figma was never on track to change the world. They were an Adobe clone from the beginning, out-executing them, but fundamentally exactly as anti-innovative.
Not that $20B is anything to shake a stick at — but real innovation in this market will be worth one to two orders of magnitude more. Figma was scratching at this with their "whole org collab" vision and FigJam, but they lacked the vision to crack it, and their execution has been faltering since their early talent started jumping ship. Selling to a desperate Adobe, distressed by public markets, is the perfect chance to "fail up."
Why am I disappointed in Figma? Because they could have been so much more. Because in effect, they have held the creative world back by doubling down & cashing in on Adobe's corruption of design tooling. Play Adobe games, win Adobe prizes. It's just a shit game, and peanuts compared to latent opportunity in this space.
Figma literally changed my world so I couldn't disagree more.
Today I have +800 users and +100 editors in my Figma system; copy writers, ux, ui, ur, pm's, analysts, bizz, everyone, is collaborating like I have never seen in any Adobe setup.
Adobe hasn't even been a contender, meanwhile Figma won over Sketch and Invision as well. So while I agree that they are still missing some features, especially for shared design systems, then I don't understand your view, care to elaborate?
Figma is all about collaborating on software — yet they don't touch software.
They have been incrementally innovative in involving design-adjacent stakeholders in the design process, but the elephant in room is "how do we collaborate on _software itself_," rather than pictures of software?
When you have copywriters, designers, managers, and biz making pull requests to a Github repo via a design tool — that will be world-changing. This COULD have been our world already, but this paradigm is against Adobe's entrenched interests. Figma just played Adobe's game, and netted a cool $20B for it.
When Adobe acquired Macromedia, they extinguished an entire paradigm of design tool: "design tools that create software." Back in the booming 90's, this paradigm was _the future_.
Through that acquisition, Adobe shoe-horned the world into a paradigm of "hand-offs," and Figma's leadership (namely, Sho) doubled down on the "hand-off" vision. "Play Adobe games."
The future for collaborating on software design & build looks more like Flash, and less like Photoshop (though obviously, not quite like either.) "Exactly as anti-innovative."
"Hand-off" describes a paradigm of designer/developer collaboration where a designer creates a mock-up or prototype, then "hands off" that picture to a developer who then creates the "real thing."
Hand-offs are wildly inefficient, and the fidelity of creativity & artistic expression gets largely butchered on its way into the final medium.
Contrast with a design tool like Webflow, Flash, HyperCard, or Visual Basic, where the product of the design process is production software. Figma could have gone down this route — a harder route, admittedly, but ripe for innovation — and they chose not to.[1]
Good for them: $20B. Bad for the world.
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[1] Sho's vision is that design _should_ live in a separate world, and that hand-offs are the ideal form of collaboration — because they enable design to be unfettered by the constraints of production software. I would call this a failure of imagination: it is quite possible to explore free-form design ideas within and around production software: c.f. Macromedia Flash.
Sure, $2T — a fundamental innovation in how we "design and build" software has implications as far-reaching as the World Wide Web itself. Google IS the World Wide Web — they have previously broken a $2T market cap.
I'm surprised Figma is worth that much. For a while I was considering bootstrapping a business in this space and I was never very impressed with what I saw of Figma. Does not look that hard to compete with or replicate.
You'd never be able to compete because the design is the product. You'd just be stuck copying them, always one step behind.
Their interface's responsiveness is also a consequence of writing a rendering engine in WASM, so you'd have to figure that out too. [1] Plus the real-time collab. I don't know why you pretend as if these aren't difficult engineering problems to solve.
I found another product opportunity that will be faster and cheaper to build. That I believe I could out-compete Figma were I rich does not mean I _am_ rich.
Just my opinion, but your original comment comes off as comically dismissive of what Figma has done.
Adobe, a company with literal billions in cash and thousands of engineers, wagers 20 BILLION dollars that it is not easy to compete or replicate what Figma has done. In fact, they attempted to compete with Adobe XD and "lost".
The founders of Figma started working on the beginnings of it in 2012 (perhaps indirectly) and launched in 2016. They also raised 330+ million in VC money to make it happen.
I'm a bootstrapped at heart and love the idea of small companies outmaneuvering giant elephants but suggesting one could outdo Figma, with relative ease, just doesn't sound likely.
All that said, if you truly feel like you can, get out there and do it! Theres billions of dollars waiting for you.
