seeing lots of comments about concerns given adobe's position in the market and past acquisitions...you can raise a compliant here: https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center with references to The Clayton Act (https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-laws-and-you-0)
Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#122No 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.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#123Earlier 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?
Powerpoint, Google Earth and Android are three that I use all the time and instantly spring to mind.
edit: Hotmail can arguably be on that list. Revit should probably also qualify
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#124I 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.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#125Many 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…
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.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#126Sigh of relief. That opens up a lot of room for new startups :-D
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#127Oh man, can't wait to never be able to cancel my Figma sub now
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#128It’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.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#129Many 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…
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.
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.
Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
#130CEO of figma, Dylan Field, has a thread on Twitter about it: https://twitter.com/zoink/status/1570385551517437952