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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#82

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…

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).

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#83

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?

Why should they? Acquisition today means: you have managed to become a threat to us, so we buy you so that this threat disappears.

I just hope Adobe doesn't buy Affinity.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#85

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…

[deleted]

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#86

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 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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#87

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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#88

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?

I think Github has held up pretty well.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#89

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…

Ah, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Geocities. I miss the days when the Internet was full of magic and wonders, and not dumpster fires.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#90
post #18

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. UPDATE: Looks like it is i…

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.

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