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.
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.