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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#72

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…

Totally agree I don’t get why antitrust gave the okay to this…

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adobe is where software goes to die. After EA acquiring Westwood, Macromedia is the second biggest let-down of a sale in the software industry in my book. Perhaps Skype comes close.

Are there any examples when an acquisition actually led to improved value for the users rather than ruined or straight killed the product?

Github. Apple buying Workflow to build it into the OS as Shortcuts.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#74

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.

On the flipside, this opens up the space for a new upstart with an innovative take on design tooling, just like how Figma came up.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#75

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 an…

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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#76

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.

> Adobe is where software goes to die. After EA acquiring Westwood, Macromedia is the second biggest let-down of a sale in the software industry in my book. Perhaps Skype comes close.

And here I was, having a good day, when you had to remind me of EA's atrocities...

Kane Lives!

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#78

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.

The company is Autodesk, the product is Autocad.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#80

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.
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