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Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

bloomberg.com

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Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#131

Post by Bilal_io »

cornedor wrote: post #45

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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#133

Post by nicoburns »

baggiponte wrote: post #72
pembrook wrote: post #22

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…

Probably because anti-trust enforcement only seems to get involved when two already huge companies are involved.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#134

Post by tomaskafka »

> 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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#135

Post by tomovo »

scrollaway wrote: post #112
pembrook wrote: post #22

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…

> This is huge news for Sketch. Why, do they have an online editor yet? 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 (sadl…

They are hiring for people with WASM/Emscripten experience so I'd say there's something planned, even if only a more sophisticated viewer...

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#137

Post by nicoburns »

lioeters wrote: post #55

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Anti-competitive_pr...

It is. Unfortunately our laws against anti-competitive behaviours are very weak.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#138

Post by coldcode »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #101
yuchi wrote: 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…

As others will no doubt call out, Affinity have been my main-stay graphics apps for some years now. Affinity Design, Photo, Publisher.... I refuse to pay a monthly fee for something I use on a scattershot basis.

Me as well, I refuse to give Adobe any money if I can use Affinity's products.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#139

Post by JKCalhoun »

crecker wrote: post #3

Ahh, Adobe.. they have earnings for billions and billions and they can not improve their software suites on performance..

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.

Re: Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B

#140

Post by alberth »

nayroclade wrote: post #54

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…

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.

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